ASM146 A Pastor for Atheists (Bart Campolo)

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well hello my friends this week we are doing something completely different as i mentioned on last week's show at the end of last year i asked you what you'd like to see happen on that science mic how you like the format and what i got overwhelmingly was you love the existing format and you love the live shows but you'd like me to shake things up a bit by doing different types of episodes like sharing my thoughts on current events which i did last week or having conversations with other people theologians scientists secularists and so that's what i'm doing this week and this week is a conversation with bart campolo now if you've never heard of bart he is a secular humanist community builder he's done that as a chaplain at usc he's currently doing that by doing some community building work in cincinnati and i would call him a secular pastor he's got an incredible pastoral heart he cares deeply about the kinds of psychological and emotional gratifications people got from religion and doesn't minimize those things so he's completely post-christian he's not religious and we had a fascinating multi-hour conversation that you can hear in this episode this is much longer than a normal episode of a science mic so don't think you're gonna finish this one in one commute this will be an episode that you pause and return to and that's fine um but i really enjoyed it also i'm sure this conversation will challenge you at some point if you're a christian you're going to be challenged by a forthright discussion of secularism and atheism if you're a secular person i get pretty numinous and spiritual at moments in the show and and vigorously defend the word christian if you're a social justice warrior uh as we kind of explore some ideas here uh you're gonna hear some devil's advocacy that might raise your hackles and i encourage you to keep listening because it does go somewhere uh so it's going to be a great episode i also want to let you know that i'm doing something that i've never done before and that is i'm going to host a webinar a free webinar on march 18th what is it about well i get a lot of questions from people who want to do platform work that means they want to write books they want to make a podcast they want to start a youtube channel in some way they want to do public education or public advocacy or public thought exploration and they're not sure how to get started or they're doing it and their efforts aren't successful and i get lots and lots of questions at every event from people uh like that and i don't want to make ask science mike a platform building program so all questions are welcome but i don't really ever select platform building questions even for patrons to vote on because i feel like it's just a part of the audience who might be interested in those kind of things so what i'm going to do instead is just do an open webinar literally anyone can come be a part of this and just answer your questions and go through some ideas i have and things i've learned from becoming a full-time public platform person i'm a professional author and podcaster and that's a difficult transition but i actually think it's important that people do public work so if that's something that's interesting to you go to mikemcarg.com webinar and give me your email address and i'll send you a link to the webinar once we get started and have it that's going to begin march 18th if you can't spell mike mccarg just go to ask sciencemike.com go to the bart ken polo episode and i'll have a link in the show notes there that you can click on and sign up for this webinar again it's completely free um you know i'm not selling anything i just literally uh i guess it'll be kind of like a webinar ask science mic where you give me your questions about platform work and branding and and business strategies and and how to do these kinds of things for a living and how to have an impact in what you do so without further ado let's jump into my conversation with bart campolo maybe we should like both introduce ourselves to our respective audiences like your your listeners like who is who's this deep voice person no i i i don't know if that's true like because when you were describing your audience as especially on that the liturgist show yes i think probably there's a lot of like i think that both people that listen to my podcast also listen to that that show um so that's that's good all right well uh so they know they'll know like i i my guess i'm guessing no no in fact the reason i reached out to you okay back in the day like six months ago was because i keep i kept getting emails from people who are like you should talk to this guy like you'd love this guy like people who listen to my eyes i've been listening to this guy and so i was like wow if you've heard you know if you've you know i just hear about you so much from all my people i was like i should probably i should probably reach out to this person that's incredible uh does that surprise you it's just cool yeah i mean because the work what i found in this phase of my life is uh my work is very public very media driven so without me doing anything like people who have been whose work and who's teaching or research has been critical at junctures in my life i've ended up encountering through that same thing you talk to people yeah and it's like what you know what i mean so i literally when you emailed me i got up from this chair and i ran down the hallway to go tell james like oh you will not believe who just emailed me so you know what i mean that's very strange to me yeah and the weird thing about like like what i was saying in my life right now virtually like people from my podcast they'll just write me a letter and i'll write back to them yeah like i have like like it takes too much of my time but like i still haven't gotten the place where there's there's no filter between me and and them and what's more is most of the people that listen to my podcast like i've hung out with i know them from somewhere wow and so when they write to me and say science mike i've been listening to this podcast or i read this book or whatever it is like i take that really seriously i'm like you touched you touched nikki bellinger well nikki bellinger like i've known her since she was in college and like she's had a really hard time and you were really helpful to her so like it's not so much like he's an influence or like i you know have you seen the latest sam harris thing it's like you touched a person i know right wow you know so i i don't get very like all the people i touch like i know by name um and so that's really different than i think when you get to the level i i did i had a conversation with um with hank green oh wow yeah yeah oh do you know like see everybody knows i subscribed to like five youtube channels i am not worthy now here's the thing hank green writes me a letter right writes me an email and he says hey i'd like to come on your podcast oh my god so i write to him and say dear hank i don't know this guy from adam i don't listen to any media i don't know i said dude hank like tell me a little bit about yourself like because usually like i ask people to like i don't usually just allow anyone like i just people don't just invite themselves on my podcast and i was like what is it that you want to talk about it's back and he says actually bart i would i have a fairly large audience i just thought it might help you like i really like your podcast and and and i i just i asked the people in my audience who should i reach out to and they suggested you so like i'm just like so then i go on the google and i'm like oh snap you know yeah he says okay it's like if you didn't know who oprah was right and she was like i was thinking that maybe like we i could talk to you about your book and you're like yeah you know i've got i've got bowling that night so but but in any case like when you're talking with hank he his reach is so far beyond right he is not like he knows people individually who are representational samples but his audience is too big for him to actually have a relationship with him at this point you know a direct relationship there was a you're probably there there was a grief for me when i when you realized you were crossed over yeah yeah because i used to reply to every every single email that came in right and it took until you realized that one more time and then i was spending you know i would spend five hours a day replying to emails and my wife was like this is no yeah and i was and and i was not getting caught up in five hours a day an email and i've been knowing that for five years yeah i i i i got written up in the new york times magazine about a year and a half ago and that just crushed me like all of a sudden you have a thousand emails in your box and i just didn't know what to do and i botched it like it was my moment of opportunity where i could have developed and i just i just botched it like i didn't know what to do i ended up losing half those emails like literally you know in a snafu with my gmail account where does that come from what is that unique to kind of post evangelicals this uh this feeling that you are failing a stranger if you don't really respond to their email well you know because i have other people that do public work but who don't who don't have never felt that compulsion you know what i think it is is i was listening to you i went to see you in cincinnati and uh and you you because and you started out by talking about when you started your work like you just felt like you were listening to people and people were just resp like they just needed to be listened to and i think that the letters i get are from people who are almost always saying your angle or your voice i've been looking for that i haven't found that and you know and they'll describe the places they've been looking and why it and so you feel like it it like if somebody came into my bicycle shop and said i need a i need a bike tube i don't feel like like you can get a bike tube at the shop down the street or the one next door so like but like if you come to me and say like you are the mr stradivarius like you're the only person that makes the thing i'm looking for you feel a lot more of a load but the other thing is i think that it's a certain kind of person that ends up being a post-christian minister there are a lot of angry post-christians or bitter post-christians but like i think you can't end up being a post-christian minister or community builder um or purveyor of hope without having a certain kind of heart and i think it's that same heart that that makes it very hard to not answer somebody's email mm-hmm now i don't it's funny i say you can't you know post-christian like i guess ostensibly you're not post-christian like oh god you were post-christian and now you're like like you've re-embraced the word god but like i don't know if you mean anything different by it than what i mean by like universe or reality um but you but your post whatever it is that hurts people yes and so they're still they're still coming at you i think a fair way to say it is a majority of christians in america would consider me post-christian i think that's that's safe to say but you know what there was this write-up about my book on a on a fairly progressive uh website wherein the author of the book review lamented my influence as a sign of the coming death of the church um yeah that's so interesting it might be fair i don't know i mean because it's funny because when i first when i first encountered you i was prone not to like you yeah and not just out of jealousy um no because you do feel that way sometimes like you see somebody like like i went to the thing with my wife yeah and halfway through it i look at my wife and go like he he's he's doing what i do and you know in the way that you're talking and gently moving people in these ways and she looked over and said yeah and he's a lot better at it than you are oh oh and i said she didn't mean it immediately i was like i know i know this is like it was it was both exciting because like you're like this is because the the way you listen to the people that ask you questions and hear what's really behind it and and speak back to what they're really asking instead of looking for a way you can score a point off what they said this is very touching to me it was like but you know we were just really moved by watching what was going on and and so i and i felt like i just i did a thing with brian mclaren is an old friend of mine and i'm sure you've encountered it yeah and he and i did a thing recently at the wild goose festival last summer about how to talk with friends and family members who believe very differently than you do and even though he's still ostensibly in the camp um you know he's he's on the other side of a lot of lines from a lot of his family and friends and of course i am and um and and and i you know i i ended up on the one hand being so touched and amazed by what he was doing and then just like grinding my teeth and going like why don't you come over all the way yeah there are so many people out in the world beyond christendom who have no pastors who have no community builders who have no sort of pastoral counselors and i see like rob bell and you and brian mclaren and pete rollins and all these like winsome communicators and i'm like there's and they all say to me like well we're trying to make the church a safer place and we're trying you know like like there's all these people and i'm like there's a thousand people ministering to people in that kind of title zone space and there's nobody on the other side but then when i i mean like i feel so lonely out there in like openly secular right let's build a loving community built around pursuing goodness in a secular way yes but then i went to your thing and it was and i watched you do your thing and it would have pissed me off except there were 500 people there or more very few of whom attend the church right yeah and i thought you know what those people like evidently there's more of them than i thought and i thought like okay maybe and i thought to myself the way they were talking with you i was like they don't have a lot of options either and so then i like then my anger went away a little bit well i think does that make sense strategically yeah uh if you imagine like a line and over here is rob and brian and over here is you and someone like ryan bell you know the the the secular uh openly secular open secular but a positive outlook community builders yeah and not anti and not and not anti-christian or anti-theist or even anti-religion right what i'm trying to do is take an eraser to the line between those groups yeah i'm just i'm so over the atheist versus the first of all i'm neither um so i have no use for the atheist versus theist debate because i don't lack a belief in any god or gods like an atheist would but i don't assert a being or personal god like a theist must and so what we've done in the west is dichotomize spiritual experiences as falling on either side of a dichotomy of atheist or theist and i think for me and for literally millions of americans that's an absurd construct that doesn't reflect our lived experience and um so i'm trying to say what sam harris encounters in meditation he elects to not describe as a spiritual experience and that is fine there there's a there's perfectly valid reasonable logical rational reasons to remove religious and spiritual imagery from a meditative style experience there are other people who stand on a mountaintop after a hike and they look out and they feel a connection to something and they they don't want to connect it to traditional religious language because of the history of violence and oppression that has happened so often with religion which may have impacted them personally but they also don't want to rationally deconstruct that experience into a set of labels and categories right so this is like the largest the fastest growing group in religious identification in america what we're finding is america is not getting all that much more secular it is getting less religious and certainly less institutionally so so you have this middle space and that's what i'm interested in because all of these people what they share in common with openly secular people is a lack of community those people in the middle that's who i'm after like that's who i'm trying to draw in to community and i'm not trying to draw them into using like harsh language or anything like that i'm trying to say to them listen you still need like i think of religion as a collective effort to answer life's ultimate questions like where do we come from what happens when we die what makes life meaningful what makes something right or wrong all these all like these are the things people need to figure out and i think we're we're sort of evolutionarily prone to go supernatural yes like oxford would agree with you yeah i i mean i think i think that evolution like supernaturalism is very common like you could wipe i mean dawkins could wipe out all the religion in the world today and tomorrow some people would decide to believe in god again yes like they would invent it like all over again the flying spaghetti monster would become a real deity in people's minds something yeah right something would happen there because peop you know because people want certainty they want they're looking for explanations right they're looking for stories and and now now the nobel laureates would not like the more educated you are the more kind of understanding you get the more perspective you have like the like not going super not going supernatural is like it's an overcoming of human nature like we're also violent by nature right you know and like but we're less violent stephen pinker tells us than we've ever been before and you're like that is a that is an accomplishment of civilization and not believe not going supernatural when you don't know what's going on that's an accomplishment of civilization but there's still these ineffable experiences there's still these transcendent moments there's still the sense of standing on that mountaintop that you described and wanting to thank somebody or wanting to praise something or wanting to celebrate and what i want to say is like you don't have to go supernatural in order to embrace that kind of spirituality like it's a there's such a thing as secular spirituality um and when you're around people that so i'm with you that like there's a dividing line that needs to be erased but i don't want there to be one like well there's you over there doing you know kind of like secular secular humanism and then there's these spiritual but not religious people and i sort of go like i think it's the same i think it's the same people hmm i think that the difference is is that you got one set of people that are really afraid to quantify or to ritualize or to put some music to or some poetry to the experience of being overwhelmed by the reality of nature in a secular way because they're like if we put poetry to that and if we put ritual to that we're going to end up sliding down the slippery slope to the southern baptist convention and they're not they don't have to so that's where i found you so i'm was publicly a southern baptist and privately an atheist and did a lot of um searching online i couldn't talk to anybody in my life so it was mainly discussion threads online with atheists where i would say but what about morality yeah how do we have any morality and um i was lucky to find communities where there were some pretty nurturing post theists and atheists leaning folks who wouldn't uh mock my questions because that can't happen online there can be a mockery about sincere questions and deconstruction and transition can you sidebar here sure like i'm one of the few people you'll know that has no online life um and like i think some in some ways my when people say like you're your form of secular humanism is really different and i go like i think it made simply like i wasn't i was never in that space but your work is represented so when i was talking about book you know one of the things i value about the church is the capacity to be active in community and not just in an insular way but at their best church church congregations turn outward and and serve a local community that's not membership driven and so someone said well what about tony campolo i was like oh excuse me what about bart campolo and i said who's that because i didn't know who tony come sure and right because you grew up in southern brazil and they so i i'm you know heard of you far before i heard of you your father and at first didn't realize you were related until like a book anyway so but they said he's a a a chaplain at usc i said why are you talking to me about a chaplain when i'm making attrition atheism said he's a secular humanist he's a humanist chaplain i went oh my gosh what is this right so then i started uh digging through your work and and people talk about your work and and five minutes later when you dug through all my work that's actually what helped me get a vision so first what i went all in on was building secular community as an atheist yeah so i started devoting my online time to finding every thread where someone said i don't know what i believe anymore and going it's gonna be okay we're gonna be okay if you decide there's a god again that's gonna be fine if you decide there's no god it's gonna be fine i've heard rumors that there's life right on the other side either way and then a lot of people but i'm a pastor and there's nothing else i can do like who's going to hire me what job can i do uh i went to seminary a very real concern right i don't know what i would do with my life and um and so i would devote hours a day those are the emails to this right well this pre-email that nobody knew who i was so i'm just on discussion boards like actively reaching out recommending books they can see people try this video and then just kind of responding honestly from my own experience i would say well listen like my wife doesn't know i'm an atheist so i understand your your fear but just literally to try to say to someone you're not alone which is like the animating energy of my entire work still and that came from hearing that there was a humanist chaplain oh yeah you couldn't make me any happier no no just because i i like when i when i i heard you tell the second half of that story when you're in cincinnati about getting on these boards and listening to people and surf you know and and and marty and i were talking about that and just saying like what an important thing to do like just to listen you know because i feel like that's a lot of what i do is i can just listen yeah and hear people talking to me about stuff and uh the thought that that that behind that was a was a moment of like well there's because there's a possibility that really will be okay because i feel like that's you know that's the animating energy of my work it's like to sort of say you like all that stuff you loved about being because i loved being a christian all that stuff you loved about being a christian is still available to you um it's still available to last night they showed that movie um the movie because my dad and i made they made it somebody made a documentary about my dad and mice relationship and um oh yeah that's right i gave you that dvd which is still in his shrink wrap um no i'm kidding um but it's funny that i gave you a dvd because like who has a dvd player i've got an xbox that plays dvds i had to figure that out but i was like oh i can actually play that so they showed that movie yeah at ufc and uh i went to it and afterwards they did a q a and one of the people there was the leader of the inter varsity christian fellowship at ufc's work was a grad student there um and he and he raised his hand and he said if there was one thing you would want to say to the evangelical community now because he says you seem to you seem to have sorted out a lot of stuff with your dad but like if there's one thing you wish we know what i ended up saying i'd never said this before but i said when you see my fellowship on campus i think when i was a christian i was raised to believe that those guys might think that they love each other and that they might think they have a sense of purpose and they might think that their relationships have the same quality as ours but they can't possibly have the same quality because they're not infused with the love of god and the holy spirit isn't guiding that and i said if there's one thing i would tell you having been in both it's in our little community of people that not all secular people not all atheists not those angry ones but like these people that are getting together seeking to build loving relationships and to fight for social justice and to cultivate a sense of wonder and gratitude the quality of love the hugs are exactly the same like like the sense of i've got to drive through the night to get there because like my friend needs me there i said and i said to him i said if you're right about god then what i would say is then the holy spirit is at work in us my dad calls me an anonymous christian then that's and that's god that then like i'll grant you like if you're right about god what all i'm saying is is that the same god stuff that's happening in your relationships is happening over here and and if and if it turns out there is no personal god all i'm saying is is that that that thing that you figured out how access through all these rituals and all these relationships it works the same way but when i was a christian i was terrified of losing my faith because i thought i loved that substance right whatever you call it yes i loved it and i and and the thought that i was gonna have to walk away from it was probably the saddest part of the whole thing for me it wasn't losing out on heaven by the time i gave up you know like the idea of a heaven goes fast doesn't it well you know i was like because like ultimately having gone long before jesus went right like the idea that we live in an eternal utopia like like on the face of it is so weird like you know you're going to see your grandmother how old will she be like how old will you be like you know you know like none of it made any sense to me even when i was a christian but this business about losing the fellowship that was as real as the young life club down the block and so the thought of losing that was was devastating and and so i feel like one of my big animating things is just to say to people you know what you don't have to lose that like you can build that around an abiding an abiding belief that this life is the only one that you have so let me ask you this you're building community yeah i'm building community i have had a much less success facilitating others in building their own communities so people listen to podcasts they feel less alone they don't invent a city they all come see me they get back in their cars they leave it goes away they listen to the podcast again and i i love that the podcast would bring someone comfort but uh i want to see people that's what hank green said getting together and hugging each other and and and and doing things in their community together right and uh people ask me for that and every attempt i've made has just not been very successful at all and the church has this pretty incredible pipeline of training people to go into a place and establish and build a community and i'm not interested in planting institutional churches there's there's little that interests me less and believe me uh denominations wave money at me and beg me to plant churches uh but i don't want to help establish communities that have some you've got to believe these things to belong um have you had any success in teaching others how to kind of build their own way to gather together i hope so but like back up when you say i the church has this pipeline of training people to do that do they really yes but what is that pipeline like like you grew up in church you were a southern baptist deacon so you were one of the people that went from being a part of the congregation to being one of the people that's crafting that's that's crafting that community that's curating that community right how did how did you learn how to do that because you're i mean and you could you stand up in front of a group of people and you create community in a room of strangers in 15 minutes how did you learn how to do that watching people do it right and and so did i i watched people do it number one and i was fortunate because i got to hang out with some of the people that were doing it and they would take me in the back room and show me how the sausage was made and so so what happens is is that i was talking to ryan bell yesterday about secular chaplaincy because he's he's sort of taking on the mantle of being just found that out and i am so happy yeah and he was sort of saying like we you know how do you how did you do it like and like he's a smart guy he'll figure it out but like he was sort of like can you you know can you give me any shortcuts like because i heard you don't go to the monday night like the student group met on monday nights he's like i heard that you hardly ever go went to those he assumed that i was running them i was like no no i ran the sunday night meeting i ran a sunday dinner right and i told the kids like i run that thing i give the talk i plan like i plan the activities like you you just bring you just come along but then the money night thing they did but i would meet with them on wednesdays to plan their monday night thing and it was in the planning meetings like like they would say i was they would say well we're gonna we're gonna have this speaker and i was like who's gonna introduce them and they're like i don't know i was like how are you gonna arrange the chairs in the room um okay like are you gonna do q a afterwards or are you gonna break up into small groups and and they were like why are you obsessing over the minute details of how the i'm like it's the whole thing it's the whole thing i remember the first time i got them together and i said listen i i sat in on one of your meetings and i said at the beginning of the meeting everybody was talking to their friends and i said the five of you were talking with each other you're not supposed to talk to each other at those meetings you're supposed to talk to each other here and then at those meetings you're working the room looking for who's not got anybody to talk to introducing people to people that you think would be good and they were like oh okay like they they're smart kids but like they had never seen it done because they didn't grow up in church right right right and they and and they had never they had never seen i i gave my first talk at one of those dinners a little 10 minute talk after one of the kids came up and said was that a sermon because like you told that story and i i i cried you know like i didn't expect that at a secular meeting and like you know it was an emotional moment like you know trying to craft an emotional moment tell a story in such a way as it impels somebody to action and i was real open about how i was doing it but the point is mike you you didn't learn that stuff in seminary i didn't go to seminary you learned that stuff by being part of it so the question is how are you as a podcaster gonna plant you know you have thousands hundreds of thousands of people listening you go like well do you know what you'd have to do you'd have to do one and invite like three smart people to come and do it with you for a year and then they'd know what you were doing because you know how to do it like i mean you do it as easily as a a a frog jumping off a log um i'm trying to you know do the southern thing like i don't know i don't know if you caught that that totally works yeah yeah did you feel that i did yeah um but that's where i like you learn it by seeing somebody do it that's why i'm pissed off that brian and you and rob and all those people are doing all this great media stuff but you're not planning anything look small and local and you go like but like rob bell shouldn't be doing one little thing he can't make a big impact that way and i'm like yeah he could if he did one little thing in his in his in his backyard and every year he had like five young men and women who were on his intern team and they worked with him in that in that little local community for a while and then he said all right you gotta go and then they would know how to do it elsewhere so when i was at ufc every year i would have a student leadership team those are the people that when they graduate are going to run the world's best book group those are the people that when they graduate are going to start a little a little weekly dinner party that's going to be about about pursuing goodness i mean like because they look they know how to do it because they did it and so you i don't think we can do a series of podcasts because like it's feel like like imagine doing a podcast how did how how to drive a stick shift like how do you know when to shift from second to third you got to be in the car with somebody and they've watched and you're like now hit the clutch now and you just you learn it by doing it to your credit i tried to learn to drive a stick shift by reading about how stick shifts and transmissions you're such a nerd and it was a dismal failure and my dad said you just gotta feel it and i'm like because he's like i was like what is the criterion for when you shift from first to second he was like you gotta feel and how do you know when the guy coming up to you who's saying he'd like to help out with the uh with the cooking how do you know if he's the scary crazy control freak who's gonna who's gonna alienate everybody out on your volunteer team or not and you go like you're like well how do you know like i've been at it for 30 years yeah i can feel that guy and he says well how's it how's a 22 year old going to learn and like they're going to stand next to me and after that guy walks away i'm going to go like okay did you see this did you see the way the way he asked like that's that's a red flag and then they're going to try it and sometimes it'll work so like it's it's an imperfect science but like building a community is like it's like putting together a band it's like putting together an orchestra it's like you know it's about people and it's about vibing the room and like being in a room full of people and knowing when people are getting uncomfortable with how long the person is talking and realizing you've got to find a way to cut that thing off am i you know what i'm saying i do and so and so all these people are sort of saying to me i have a podcast audience of like 10 million people and they're all really lonely and i can't figure out as a podcaster how to help them find the friendships that they want and i go like yeah you know what that's the limit of the podcast wow wow but there is but you can you can use the podcast to get people to the point where they want to do that right but then you're going to have to have some like some local person who's doing it and say hey will you take one person on and show them how to do what you do because like you know there are people that run little leagues that know how to do this stuff there there are people running quilting circles that know how to do something a great community builder is not necessarily a great podcaster right it's a it's a separate skill set it's a separate skill set but like we've got to become better at highlighting good communities and and also at convincing older people that know something about relational ministry to share what they know with younger people you know you i i'm talking too much no no i kind of am because i was like all excited to get i'm gonna get to talk to science mike and and and people were like you didn't actually talk you talked at science mike uh well and oh gosh i am also it's a huge problem for me in podcasting in that uh i find the greatest value listening over speaking so anytime we get someone on the liturgists or when i have people just in conversation i tend to think how much can i get out of this person's brain in the time that i have yeah yeah but one thing i wanted to kind of circle back on you talk about like you know uh rob's building a media thing uh my work is media um and i only say that that's not the only thing to do because i can't do that well but i think one one thing i mean like that's just special uh i think a lot of people who have done community building in a church context the reason they aren't anymore is some degree of trauma yeah i never got hurt and so they don't want to sh could i start a local open community that like jesus is a myth and there's an empty tomb people could all be in the same room and be comfortable i absolutely could does the thought terrify me that i would turn around and traumatize someone the way that i was traumatized that i would hurt someone means the podcast is a way for me to help people without feeling like i could actually hurt them and i think that's very common i think you're right and people who were in the the institutional church and now aren't the reason they go into this medium is i'll get into your life but i won't get into your life so much that i'll let you down and you can turn me off anytime you can turn me off anytime you want yeah you know what when i first came out of christianity um and was done i instinctively knew that like people need community i mean i that have been my whole life and and people people need to feel like they're part of a narrative that's bigger than themselves so i immediately went looking for like what's my new narrative um you know i remember reading this book neil shubin's book the universe within and it's kind of like a book length treatment of how we are made of stardust yes and i think yeah this is part of it and then i read ursula goodness book the sacred depths of nature and she and what i was looking for are people that could tell the epic of evolution in a way that was inspiring and i instinctively like i knew that we needed a new narrative to be to be part of but but i still in terms of the lifestyle stuff was trying to figure out the one right way to be a secular humanist or the one right way to pursue goodness without god like how does one build a good life and i was looking for one the scientifically evidence-based best way to live and it took me years to realize that i had left christianity but i had carried with me the fundamental the one the looking for a one true way because that's the thing like when you get away from the god stuff all of a sudden it dawned on me there are many ways to live a good life there are many ways and and the way an autistic person is going to thrive and the way a hyper extrovert is going to find the way it thrive and the way somebody who's you know got got a really high cognitive function in the way of somebody who's not very very bright like there are a lot of different ways to thrive as a human being when it comes to community building i think a lot of times when the former pastor like is afraid of of messing people up he assumes that the community that he's going to start is going to have to be selling the true way of secular life and he instinctively knows that like any time you're selling like there's one way to live you're going to hurt people and i think that the important thing is to to recognize because because when you're in southern baptist church you're like we need to get everybody else to believe what we believe we need to get everybody else everybody else is right or wrong to the to the degree to which they vary from our our one true path but you could start a secular community almost like you start a rock and roll band and go like we're gonna play funk we're gonna play this this kind of like steamy punk funk music and if you like this music you should pled you should join our band and if you like playing polka music it's great this isn't the band for you right start a pokemon and just to be to embrace the fact that like we're not saying this is the way we're saying this is our way and all of a sudden a lot of that pressure of well what if we get an argument over what kind of music like what if the group you go like oh then you just like sort of say to the polka people like you go over there you know like like it's not a big deal like don't build a building like don't print up a doctrinal statement like you're a band and the pressure comes off a little bit because you're allowed to embrace the fact that this is and that this is about your own personal taste and what you're really looking for is not to impose upon the world and like the new like the true path of life but you're simply trying to like pull together a tribe of people that thrive playing the same kind of music does that make any sense it does because my approach to christianity is not as a universal truth claim but as a genre of spiritual practice so if you like christianity as a spiritual genre i'd love to jam with you if you don't i'd love to hear about how you play yeah i'm not worried yeah yeah like it's just one way of like my you know the larger category is are you pursuing the good life you know like oh how are you doing that oh how are you doing that and like so when it comes to community building it's okay to just say i'm to try to build a community for people that are in my genre for people who work like me and we're going to sing the kind of songs that we and you say what should a secular community sing and i go like well if i'm in it not because i'm a good singer but because i strongly value the emotional resonance that music brings to a group and i've studied the science and i think like synchronous movement is like like but if that triggers you like crazy freaks you out doesn't mean you're not a good humanist just means you you probably shouldn't come to my sunday night dinners because we're gonna probably sing some songs right right hmm but like you know i'm thinking about you and i'm thinking the reason people come out to see you is because you talk about life in a way that they resonate with and you say well when i leave but like so then 500 people who come out to listen to you and you go like why why when i leave why don't they just keep getting together and the obvious answer is because you're not there and you're like well that's almost to say it like you can't have a community without a leader like like yeah like i'm sorry all you people that got hurt by bad authoritarian spiritual leaders like the alternative is not community with no leaders there's no such thing the alternative to bad leadership is not no leadership it's good leadership it's accountable leadership here's one mr science mike have you read anything by carl popper yes okay i i don't even know how to describe him like is he a political political theorist is he a philosophy of science like i don't know what he is yeah as as as most compelling thinkers are he tends to bend genres quite a bit but he shows up in like every good book you're reading there's a karl popper reference right so i read this thing about karl popper and he said with respect to government that the goal of pilot of political theory like the best political system was not the one that chose the best leaders he said most political theory is based on how do we get the correct representation how do we choose the right leaders he said it's the wrong answer because you're picking human beings and no matter how right you are you will always make mistakes he said the the mark of a good political system is the one that most quickly and effectively gets rid of obviously bad leaders he's like no matter how good a picking system you have you're going to screw up but the problem is like in america you pick a bad leader and there's nothing you can do about it for four years right and four years is a lot of time to do damage so the question is how do we come up with a system that ensures that if we make a horrible mistake not that not that that would ever happen in this country that we can quickly correct it right now what i would say is is that that carl popper starts saying like listen there's no there's no getting around the fact that people screw up and that leadership corrupts people and that leadership is a dangerous thing but he's like it's unavoidable you must have leadership and so so i would say that when you're when you're forming a community it's probably like the the idea like well you know you shouldn't need a charismatic person who's really good at like sort of throwing a party to have a good party and i'd like but you do have you ever seen any human endeavor that succeeded without leadership show me a school show me a university show me a company show me anything i'm taking the question seriously i i'm honestly trying to think of a an exception well well there was the uh there was the um occupy movement oh wait yeah not a lot of staying power there yeah oh my hmm i could just hear the uh the brains popping in podcast land as we're talking well i mean because most of your people are in the space that they're in at least many of them got driven out because they got they got hurt by a leader they got failed by a leader or you know like like bad leadership is so rife especially in the church so like you got all these people that are trump trump you know post-traumatic yes post-leadership trauma and somebody comes along and says you know what the only way you're really going to ever be able to thrive and find the kind of community that you're looking for is to re-embrace the idea of building communities around a certain kind of leadership and like i'm really sorry it's so weird i'm so sorry among my crew the post-church people don't want to do it because of fear and trauma and then what i've actually noticed is some of the people who've never been in church who follow my work like they're all in there like i'd love to start something what do i do they don't because they because they they never wear the young life opposite that's right inclination that's exactly right because i have no problem i had i was at an event and uh someone walked up in a with a nietzsche quote on the shirt you know um what i think was religion is the opiate of the masses i didn't know that was nietzsche um who's karl marx karl marx yeah so yeah karl marx shirt religious is the opiate of the mass a lot of socialists in my audience and he walks up and he introduces an older woman who turns out to be his mother and he introduces me as his pastor right so he's an atheist um this was in seattle family's never been in church introduces me as the pastor and as he was talking he said you know how do i do what you do i was like we just get a microphone and no no no no no like in this room that's right and he was really interested but uh my public speaking ability as i got into my professional career i started looking at people like steve jobs and really great secular communicators but my communication skills come from watching a pulpit every sunday it's for my entire childhood yeah and and and learning as much from terrible preachers as great ones you know what i mean the person the people i would as i got you know eight or nine years old when a pastor bored me those were the ones i really paid attention to why is this boring what cues are they missing in the room what about why was this interesting for 12 minutes but now minute 15 is not what happened where did they lose it and i studied it yeah when i used to give talks i would give a talk and i would leave the crowd in a certain place and depending on how they organized the event what music they put on after me or whether they came up and gave announcements or whatever they could wreck right what i had done right or they could take advantage of it and pivot it into it into an incredible thing and you realize like oh it's not like the talking is just a piece of it yeah you know it's just a piece of it and so yeah when that guy comes up to you and says i want to do what you do what he's really asking is how do you create a safe space where people can open up to each other and and form connections you know people say to me why do you always have dinner when you're gathering a group of people like okay i i from i have a lot of data to suggest that when people eat together it frees up certain parts of their brain that make them and we're able to connect with each other and stuff like that i also like grew up in church and saw it happen we have to cover the suppers we saw it happen week after week you know and so you just go like okay that's where i say like the problem is is that some of the the people that have come out of the church they're so angry because the narrative that they were given like literally like they've had the wool pulled over i mean i know so many people that are saying i i felt guilty for masturbating every time i masturbated until i was 30 years old like i'm pissed right like like they took away the joy of sexuality i was a young person my body was emerging nature was doing its thing with me and i miss it all right like they're angry or like i feared dying and burning in hell you know like the pain that people go through and so when they get out of that when they get out of that they want to walk away from the covetous suppers from the mission strips from the music they're like it's all tainted it's all associated with this narrative that says you're a piece of [ \_\_ ] and you're gonna burn in hell forever um unless you like accept the grace of god right and so but like you yourself have no intrinsic value just in case you're wondering like that narrative is so painful that when you come out of it you want nothing associated with it but the truth of the matter is is that the church didn't doesn't hold together on the strength of that narrative it holds together in spite of the violence of that narrative because of the music and the missions trips and the coverage of suppers and the pastoral caregiving and knowing who should and shouldn't be allowed to run the kitchen and you know all of those things and so you know we throw that stuff out the window at our apparel man do i totally agree i totally so what i'm trying to figure is like if i had you know like i'm finding myself going like if i had a huge podcast audience and you know what would i do and and in a sense i think i would have conversations where we would get down to some some of the nitty-gritty and go like hey will you let let's tell some stories about like the best group meals we ever went to and like what made them work like because like i've been to really good dinner parties and i've been a really bad ones like what made them work and like actually talk about the nuts and bolts of putting together a dinner party where people end up leaving feeling closer to each other like you're like there are skills that we could talk about but in the end it would be like talking about shifting a car that it's good to talk about if you've ever been in a car like you and i could talk about shifting a car and we talk about like you know how because we've done it right but the only way we're ever going to really raise up a generation of people that know how to put together a really good book group or a really good weekly dinner party or a really good secular community are going to be if we can get the people that are doing it to show some people how it's done and that's that's you know that's kind of and that's and again that's why i'm like brian mclaren wherever you are come help like because he knows how to do it but most of the people that he goes and speaks to they also know how to do it they all grew up in that culture and out here among like the guy who came up to you in seattle he needs brian mclaren um i think so i think there could be an almost two-prong strategy using my audience as a point of reference one strategy is to create local communities to help people understand how that's done uh so part of that will involve people who've left the institutional church dealing with their own [ \_\_ ] and you know what stop because that's where you're doing an incredible service because you're helping people process their ptsd and you're giving them some new language and maybe if you keep working with them like you know as if you're a therapist but like maybe if you keep doing that some of them will get to the place where they're like okay i'm ready to try again and they've already got the skill set but they haven't been wanting to do it because they were traumatized and like you're helping them work through the trauma so like it may be that there's a whole bunch of people in your audience that when you're done with them we'll be like okay i'm tired of being alone ever and and look around like there's a lot of people tired of being alone that a lot of people that want to party but i actually know how to throw a party right so i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna get back in the game yeah so there's that and obviously that's important to me but another thing that i'm a part of um that i think a lot of people write off as impossible but is kicking the violence out of the institutions um out of which institutions the church the church proper so part of the reason i'm still on the inside of the church oh gosh is um you and everybody you and everybody are trying to fix the church well it's not i don't the problem is there's just a lot of stuff there that's useful right right so just listen if you here's the thing if you've got a really violent submarine and you want to build a really good submarine just study that submarine and then go start from scratch like don't like just start from scratch one of the most exciting things i've ever seen was at the armstrong flight research center at nasa's flight center they had an sr-71 blackbird yeah i've seen it right which they had repurposed as a scientific instrument oh so they were actually flying it yes yeah okay but they took all the weapons off and they put scientific instruments and they were able to do science with that death machine that they could not have otherwise yeah but i mean and same thing that f-16s completely repurposed as research aircraft yeah can i just say so like the church is not a black bird okay it just isn't because one of the things that the the essence of the church narrative is this exclusivist thing like like there's an exclusivity to that narrative that the only people the only christians that you're going to really get to to build this wonderful kind of thing the non-violent church are ones that essentially aren't christians anymore or they're not evangelicals anymore yeah they're done with it they're done with the exclusive narrative they're they've they've embraced the idea that that christianity is a expression yes of the will to goodness yes um rather than which is relatively common in the mainline church right like mostly yeah right and like yeah those those lovely methodists did you with and stuff like that and so i go like there are so many people working like like those guys the methodist church is that a violent church still parts of it are certain parts of it are yeah to the degree that they are still evangelical yeah right there's an evangelical wing of the method right there's an evangelical wing of everything yeah um an exclusivist wing oh we're the right we're right and everyone else is wrong wing like there was this church i went to in seattle that's methodist and they've converted the the church is literally functioning seven days a week and it is a free needle replacement center you know what i mean like that sure and and and the thing is like and probably if you went into the heart of those people's theology they've super open yeah yeah yeah so so so i'm just saying i'm interested in that work as well i know everybody's interested in that work and i can't figure it out it's like everybody's interested in that work and i'm like that works going on and there's plenty of people to do it huh and over here there's nobody i see i guess from your perspective there's plenty of people doing it the people in that space look at evangelical mega churches and go you know there's every position is relative i suppose i guess i just all my life i've been hearing people tell me how they want to fix the church and then to make the church more of this and they want to make the church more that and so often their best energies get consumed by the politics of trying to reform things and you know if there's anything that i think i've learned from my business friends sometimes it's easier to start a new company certainly than it is to to try to change the culture of an old company and so i'm like listen if you no longer believe in that narrative even then just start a new company i mean i could understand it if you're like that's the narrative we've got to be methodist but like you know you're not you're not married to that that narrative so just start a community in around your values to start a community like this is what we're this is what we're going to pursue and you say what are we going to say about god we're not going to say anything about god like that's not this is not an error that's not part of the narrative here we're pursuing goodness for these reasons you don't have to be anti-god just i i don't know i like maybe i just i meet so many lonely people i mean so many people looking for something and if it says methodist they will walk the other way sure and if it says buddhist or muslim they will walk the other way and like there's an increase even if they were raised buddhist even if they were raised methods they would even more walk the other way so i'm like listen just couldn't we just start something that they won't walk away from um and so you know i don't know i don't know i i just i feel lonely sometimes because i think here's something i want to talk to you about because uh you probably read that dostoevsky book the brothers karamazov no have you ever heard of it though like dude i don't think so audacious is this russian novelist and he wrote this famous book called the brothers karamazov and the kind of the key uh encounter in it is between ayasha their brothers uh who's a devout christian and a wonderful person and his brother yvonne who is a devout secularist and also a lovely person in his own way but harder and more cynical um and uh eventually yvonne tells ayasha the story of the myth of the grand inquisitor which is actually a fairly famous your wife would know this jenny would know this okay um and there was a really good i was going somewhere with this yeah yeah but anyway what happens is that jesus comes back to earth and the head of the catholic church like and he's doing miracles and stuff he's starting to get a name for himself and the amer and the head of the catholic church has him arrested and he goes to interview him and he says listen what have you why are you come back here it's it took us it took us 2000 years to undo the damage you did you're trying to offer people freedom he said most people can't handle freedom they need somebody they want bread like they want they want they want they want order we tell them what to do like you know he says something really interesting he says freedom only works for a very small number of people and he sort of like draws a line and says there's there's there's human beings that function at one level and they can handle certain truths and they can handle certain stuff and then they're human beings at a different level of sort of education or sophistic or awareness or competence or whatever you want to call it and when i get in these conversations with like the social justice warrior type people it's like every system they have presupposes that everybody can do everything or can handle everything and my question is like do you think do you think there's kind of like one religion for really smart people and one religion for people that aren't so smart um do you think that like sometimes as a so in sort of social engineering you sort of go like the masses need this but the the elite won't be able to handle it or won't buy that so you have to you have to come up with an elite version and you have to admit the fact that like you have different stratas of society because like i know it's completely politically incorrect to even use the word elite yeah i i think but do you don't you think there is a natural elite when i studied uh the rise of sufi mysticism and islam i was so compelled by its theology but so turned off by its elitism or exclusivity as it played out in history and basically like some people can handle this mysticism but most people can't and what do you think of that i think that um is born out of impatience to be involved in other people's lives if we were to talk about relativity einstein's theory of relativity if you were to stand up and explain it mathematically in front of a room of a hundred people very few people would understand it immediately that would require a certain background in education but given sufficient instruction and investment an overwhelming number of people in the room could understand relativity there's nothing like that that's great that's sort of saying like given enough like anybody can dunk a basketball given enough leg strength and coordination and motivation and training you're like yeah like but i guess that's precisely what everybody doesn't have yeah but i i i'm just kidding i'm a radical egalitarian and i think if um why why there's no evidence for it i thought you were scientific there is no evidence for egalitarianism there's well i would say the this will get into more political theory but the reason is not intrinsic ability but social investment that's such [ \_\_ ] you you even know that's [ \_\_ ] when you say it like think about it think about it like you have like a hunter-gatherer tribe out there yes is it egalitarian uh or is somebody a better hunter if somebody stronger there would be better and less better hunters sure yeah of course like but the the degree of disparity between the best and worst hunter would not reflect the disparity and resources between the richest and poorest person in modern society give it time give it time that's the whole point give it time guns journalism and steal are you do you're familiar with your diamond and guns germs and steel yes right so like you go like what happens when one culture gets a little leg up the reason i looked at you funny is i thought you said gun german steel and i was like no i'm not germs and i don't enunciate very well but the theory is is that once a group gets a leg up it only you know the disparity only grows yes because it exploits its advantage and then it has a bigger advantage and you go like oh wait a second achievement rates among children in america uh nutrition plays a much larger role than heredity for example yeah i mean look you just moved to southern california have you noticed that everybody here is better looking why do you think that you say but it costs a lot more to live here you go like wait a second it's not like really rich people really smart like good looking people haven't haven't have an economic advantage oh yes they do and that once they gain an economic advantage they're richer than other people then they can marry other good-looking people and and then they can send their kids to better schools and then they can have better nutrition and like their advantage just grows and grows and grows and then go to north philadelphia where i spent a lot of my life working and like watch it work the other way systemic amplification yeah so it's like you know that when when there's the initial disparity that you find in the hunter-gatherer tribe it will only as the technology increases as the economic power as a human capacity increases that disparity will not shrink it will only grow so at some point you're going to have people that's disparity is so far apart that they're effectively two different kinds of people and the question is religiously when it comes to trying to create meaning and purpose and trying to organize a society does there come a point when it comes to like with this god stuff for instance like i'm starting you know people say to me like you'll never eradicate god and like of course not i'm not even trying to like i think god is the best narrative going for people when there's a maybe not very much money and not very much education and like you know like that's gonna you say well you come on you're not acting as though belief in a personal god is always greater in places of low education and economic deprivation like oh of course it is and so it's like i'm not trying to fight that and i'm not trying to say it's about i'm just saying like i'm i'm i'm struggling because i'm an egalitarian in my heart but i'm a science guy and there's no science to support the idea of egalitarianism and you're a science guy and so i'm trying like i hear like i hear you talk egalitarian and i go like where did that come from i guess i would i would wrestle with a notion i must i'm a slow slower slower thinker no no i just mean i i just i'm not attacking or like i'm not i'm not challenging because i i think you don't have an answer i really need help here i think that science illustrates the fundamental immorality of the way we structure society um we we we're creating if if we go to this two different types of people metaphor um it's a social construct it's it no it's not it's a it's a a social construct creating huge life consequences for people but it's it's it's not a social construct it's a natural phenomenon it happens with lobsters it happens i agree it happens everywhere totally agree but as you said earlier stephen pinker says we are getting less violent and that's good intentionally creating more equal society is also good intrinsically but stephen pinker would say we are creating um we are a less violent yes he would not say we are a less eq no we are getting more inequal yeah and what if there's a direct relationship between those two things the fascinating premise um see i i'm genuinely here's the deal like like and and you you i don't know like we're talking too long and you can i don't know what you do with editing and you can take out anything i'm just gonna yeah no edit just drop oh well you should take all this [ \_\_ ] out because so my son my point is my son is the smartest guy i know yes and he's been hugely influenced lately by this guy jordan peterson i'm not a jordan peterson fan right freaks me out right but like okay but have you read jordan peterson's book i have me too yeah i i tend to not critique things right unless i go oh that never stops oh roll yeah i critique everything i mean no i don't but like that's the thing like i was like if if this guy is appealing to so many people i love right i gotta know what i gotta know why and what i found was all this really wise stuff common sense wrapped around a world view that is just so bleak yes and i think same zone same experience dualistic wrong-headed and and and and kind of fundamentally misogynistic in the sense of like order is male chaos is female and i know he says he likes the balance but he is spending his all his time trying to fight against the female or whatever but boy that stuff the stuff he wrote in there about dominance hierarchies i was like i so i that's why i'm wrestling with this stuff is i'm going like i know that i've seen dominant hierarchies all through my life and i i don't know that egalitarianism like i sort of feel like you have to come up it's almost like you have to come up with a system or a political vision that accepts the reality of unequal strengths and people who can contribute more and people who can contribute less and i don't feel like in our in our present discourse you're allowed to say that there are people who are more valuable to the tribe than other people and the react like and what i'm saying is if you want to reduce inequality and if you want to improve the plight of people who are oppressed or disempowered right now maybe the jordan piercing is challenging me to go like because i don't like where he goes but i go like i think the reason he's appealing to people certain people is is that he's articulating something that they deep down no and that they keep having to pretend isn't true that some people are more valuable than other people some people contribute more than other people some people are capable of contributing more than other people and i i don't like like i'm so used to my language so i guess but but i think that's why he's appealing to people is because he's calling a spade a spade in certain places in a way that people go like fine finally so put my cars on the table yeah yeah go for it all beliefs are survival adaptations all human beliefs are just survival adaptations i'm an epistemological nihilist so i tend to put ideas on and off relatively easily because they're just my brain trying to survive that's all a belief is is a brain trying to no human belief describes reality with absolute fidelity they're all metaphors that point to something in the physical world that help us navigate and certainly i agree with that absolutely completely so which is what and i also want to say that again for the listeners because right now the social justice wing of the science mike audience they've got the pitchforks out they've got the the the match to light the torch and they're coming oh for me yeah so yeah and like and i'm with you i'm with them wanting to come and get me i would say um the idea of who contributes more and who contributes less exists within a set of social constructs right because what in terms of what actually contributes to our survival food shelter safety security right uh in terms of contribution i don't contribute very much to the world although i would be more on the elite side of the spectrum i grew up comfortably with all class have a great set of communication skills uh i can write books i can extract a lot of value from the economy that is utterly unrelated to people's basic necessities right but you are you are adapted to the present situation totally if that situation changes i would you could be an evolutionary casualty absolutely i'm pro and i and i i believe quite strongly if this exact set of genetic material would have appeared on planet earth in 1450 huge problems your dna might not have made it through right and if you would have gone back uh pre-civ hunter-gatherer oh boy am i a drain on the tribe right so that's that's part of what evolution does thank you evolution for keeping the species alive uh my point is at the level of raw economic output we're capable of now the raw amount of food the raw amount of shelter we can create um the reason i support egalitarianism as a philosophy and as a as a basis for moral decisions is because we've grown to have the capacity to produce more egalitarian outcomes in a in a in a 25 person homo sapien troop pre-civilization pre-language if somebody breaks their ankle you're done we have no capacity to sustain your life through the recovery of that broken ankle we are barely able to consistently eat and produce offspring so i'm sorry broken leg guy you can't walk behind left behind we're gonna we're gonna do a ritual right now to talk about your transition to the spirit world to make us feel better and then we're gonna keep walking but at some point we had enough output to say you know what you can lie down for a while and you can mend your leg and then you can reintegrate in with society well at the point we're at now we have the raw capacity and thank goodness that people with severe physical and emotional uh and mental disabilities their needs can be met and but what happens when what happens in a competitive situation like what if resources become scarce water for instance sure become scarce and a tribe emerges a group of people emerges emerged that say we don't waste any of our resources keeping the bottom five percent alive we don't waste water on those people we give them to our soldiers we give them to our scientists we give them to our we give them to our producers and that society comes into competition for resources with a society that's egalitarian in nature that shares equally theoretically speculatively yeah you would say that the society that's less egalitarian is going to have a competitive advantage maybe evolution has favored altruism for some reason so we have this balance in the species yes yes between altruism and viciousness competition and cooperation and it's a right and we're all we have a different sort of genetic tendency towards that balance and then we have a different enculturated and environmental reinforcement well and this is and i don't know scientifically objectively which is better i don't know they are more or less timeless because like as a community builder yes the down syndrome the kid with down syndrome who's a part of the community draws out of the whole community yes a a a kind of a collective collective love and and cohesion and somebody who's who's not particularly comfortable in the group becomes comfortable sitting next to this kid because he just loves everybody equally and and all this beautiful and you sort of go like wait a second maybe this tribe is stronger by sharing some of its water with that kid i mean that's a that's a hopeful thought isn't it yes um that would be my position and this is this is where i go from being a proper science person to a mystic if being a water sharer means my tribe will lose to the tribe that does not then i will happily be selected against until they come for your daughter maybe maybe that would bring out the uh the brew but i i mean there's no maybe about it i mean you know like there's no maybe about it like that is how we are wired yeah when they come for your dna you're gonna be shocked at how quickly you be you know you you're willing to sacrifice some like i i mean your kids are sweet i'm sure yeah but like if there's a sandwich and my kids it's my kid versus your kid believe me i'm not sharing that sandwich if my kid's life depends upon it that's what i've always said if if you know the the it comes out on the news that uh north korea's got a warhead in the air headed for la i load the family up in the car with sandwiches and we drive downtown we don't drive towards the desert to try to survive in the aftermath right you don't want to be there we we eat a pizza yeah we had we okay i was like wait wait what's the survival strategy no it's not it's like nope right no interest in and so but these but that is like i'm not i'm not explaining the jordan peterson phenomenon in this way but like i'm saying is like that's one of the appeals of this person is that he is willing to sort of say hey listen egalitarianism like this this idea he said like that is that is a luxury idea that you can only sustain when resources are plentiful and when there's a certain amount of political order and if that gets threatened it will be unmasked very quickly yes i'm a i'm a person i'd very much want to domesticate and keep domesticated homo sapiens we're we're not a an exciting species in our non-domesticated state yeah and so now what's interesting is that i mean not to keep harping on this but that's what jordan peterson says he's like we have to keep civilization and that's why if we go too far with the egalitarianism we will weaken ourselves to a point at which we will be vulnerable to bullies strong arms other other other like that egalitarian you can take it too far and you can deplete your resources too much as a society because you're not and then what happens is the barbarians at the gates come in and take you over yeah i mean that's a fascinating premise i don't know that you can make a data-driven research-based conclusive case well you can certainly make a historical case for it that is that it has happened it it over and over again um and societies like ours have a tendency to have i mean i would make a countercase work um there was definitely like we're going to take care of the fit in in in nazi socialism in germany um right no no no they lost yeah yeah stalin like don't get me wrong like i'm not that guy sure i'm just i'm trying to come up with a way like that what i'm struggling with is i am aware of what what jumped us off on this was for me the spirituality thing because i think like when i was at ufc among the kind of the intellectual elite these were people that they weren't interested in and they didn't want the mythological overlay on reality hmm so yeah i guess what i'd say is for whatever of course they don't like like but but but then they would say like we need to eradicate this for everyone and i'm like listen you don't know everyone right there's people at a different in a different milieu and they're struggling with different demons and like this god thing this god word this god language like like even if you dial down the supernatural content of it like that's it's good for them right and sometimes people say you're very in a sense like they sort of go like that's very patronizing yes i've heard that line of thought i disagree i i don't think it's simply a matter of economic elitism i think there's many life circumstances upon which people need the idea of god or even a personal god i know very educated people very wealthy people um working scientists who do serious research who believe in god in a personal way in a personal way uh and there's a million reasons why it oxford told us they did it you know they did a a decadal study they came up with three reasons that people believe in god uh one is babies tend to believe that uh their moms are all-knowing at some point they learn mom's not all-knowing but if in that transition state you introduce the idea of an an entity that's all knowing the brain very naturally accepts it right that's one um two is we overwhelmingly accept purpose-based explanations for observed phenomena as humans including trained scientists so you can take a scientist trained in evolutionary biology and if you drown them with enough questions over and over unrelated to their work they're looking for purpose right why are polar bears white if you give them a purpose-based explanation and then a proper evolution they're going to pick the purpose-based one and then third is homo sapiens have a hard time imagining the cessation of their consciousness so even in secular societies a majority of people believe in an afterlife of some kind so when you take those three ingredients do you have a hard time not anymore no but for most of my life sure right right but my point is if you take a nobel prize winning scientist who struggles with the idea of their consciousness ending sufficiently but they don't occasionally they do it's a much smaller percentage don't get me wrong but but but and if they and if and if they do like like first of all if a nobel peace prize-winning scientist believes in a personal god i'm going to bet you it's not because of that one it's because of the one of the first two right but i mean whatever whatever of those whatever of those recipes in a person's life means they need a personal god i'm have no interest in debasing people but i also i don't necessarily associate that with cleanly with socioeconomic position or education or education now they're certainly they're correlated um but it's a it's a spectrum where there isn't just because you're poor and of low means doesn't guarantee belief and just because you're educated enough means doesn't guarantee disbelief it still depends on probability it still depends on your mom and you're a lot yeah but you all we are also seeing uh children who are raised in secular environments are are more prone to be one of her by fundamentalist religion then people are raised in moderate religious circumstances so sure you're inoculated so much yeah exactly so that's this is what i'm saying like it's it's a very complex as anything involving this damn species it's an incredibly complex set of underlying psychological mechanisms that then manifest themselves as either you know a sacred or secular bent and i guess that's where i am i mainly view my life and the life of my species through the lens of neurology and primatology so i don't think anyone no matter how educated they are it are functioning out of some objective um high precision lens of reality that's not how we make artists everyone's functioning in social identity and belonging and emotional needs yeah that's like franz de wallston but like also like that's jonathan height and righteous mind like like look oh yeah okay right yeah you're just down here like you think you're you're we are rationalizing creatures right not rational creatures we make our decisions for all these gut level evolutionary reasons and then we come up with arguments to support them and you know one of the biggest gut level ones is this belonging thing and so if everybody around you is believing in a story mm-hmm it is it is rational to believe in that story it is that is there's your best move that is your evolutionary self saying i want to stay alive get my dna through right right stay with the tribe right stay with the group i know that was a terrible tangent and it was not based upon me trying to do anything except i'm i'm so yeah have you ever been testing ideas takes you strange places yeah but the other thing is like when you're when you're attracted to an idea that you don't want to be attracted to that was that was our story with with atheism absolutely like you know you go like wait a second that seemed to make a lot of sense i don't want to go there like i'm going to lose my job you're going to lose your marriage like like all these like it's terrifying but you're like and for me this this um this dominance hierarchies are inescapable idea that has been planted out there now um is one of those ideas that i go like i don't want that to be right right but i suspect it may be right and so i'm trying to find a way around it yes so my hope is dominance hierarchies are inescapable is a human can't run faster than a six minute mile like on the surface with with a lot of data we look it looks very strongly supported until someone runs a five minute 59 second mile and my yeah and my suspicion is is that because this has been my experience as somebody who is part of the you know more more privileged sect is that i have the suspicion that like in some prime primate groups a person will amass a bunch of status and stuff and then they will share it because by sharing it they will win a bunch of friends for themselves and that actually is a better evolutionary strategy for them than consolidating power and consolidating wealth and like i suspect that the people that are amassed like the the elite that are amassing all this thing that they are over that they are overreaching my life proves they are there's a movie you may have heard of called it's a wonderful life yeah right george bailey makes it because the weakest dump out pennies on the table that's how i eat every month right there's no huge elite institutions with incredible capital sustaining my work no no a bunch of millennials of student loans send me a dollar a month yeah and jonathan hate you know he he was talking about some research that basically if you look at uh brain size and primates how it predicts the size of social groupings and the larger the brain the larger the social grouping the more time each day a primate spends physically grooming other primates to maintain the social connections that keeps them alive until you get to homo sapiens who spend almost no time physically grooming each other but the grooming mechanism is language right so there are far more outwardly dominant people in society than me um and who amass more power and amass more personal resources but i am a case that shows altruism and copious grooming of other primates through language is its own form of power i hadn't thought about what you're doing as copious grooming but i like that totally how i know that's what it is that's good that's good right now like a couple hundred thousand people are getting their little mites picked by now i hear you i hear you and and because of that when someone who on paper in a classical survival of the fittest evolutionary model which of course not what evolution is who's bigger stronger mean or more dominant wants to come after me they have a huge problem a few hundred thousand other primates say no no that guy groomed me yeah he matters he matters right so i don't worry about someone right but you see okay so and that's the same thing so but again you like it's a different language is the selection but what we're really talking about here is not the is not escaping a dominance hierarchy it's simply your dominance expressing itself in a different way okay and i guess that's what i'm thinking is is that my way around jordan peterson may well be to say that there is always going to be people that can contribute more and contribute less and that if you are one of the elite the reason to like egalitarian like that in a sense what i want you to do is i want you to express your power in a socially responsible way where people say and and certain in a sense like that that the amount that you give away is your way of showing how strong you are i can afford look at not look at how much i look at look at this car i have like that's one way of expressing how economically powerful you are the other way is to go like look at how many people i can feed look at how many people i can love look at look at look at and so in a sense like there would still be the admission that there's in a sense and there might even be two kinds of messages that we send to us people in the society if it's funny i wrote this i'll share this with you after afterwards i wrote this lent this christian ministry asked me to write a lenten devotion entry did you see it it's it's and what i was trying to do say like there'll be a moment when you have a lot and this is what you should do and think and there's a moment when you don't have anything and this is what you should think and they're two different messages there's not an egalitarian message that says everybody should give or everybody should and i think that that may be that may be the ultimate reality is that what we have to accept is there are always going to be dominant creatures and that civilization is about expressing your dominance in service kindness and altruism are the most self-serving thing i can do yeah yeah i've always thought that too yeah hey my grandmother my dad's mom her her line was she would say anthony anthony if you have to choose between having a million dollars and a million friends take the friends yes they each should be good for a dollar a piece yes which is like your podcast totally my life yeah well it is also if we look at the circumstances right now with black lives matter and me too and people who have been traditionally held down saying no more the people who are trying to run it the old way well there the revolution if they're against the wall that's going to be a big problem whereas if you say you know what no i'm in let's do this i'm with you it ends up for a better outcome for you i think that's true i i will say this from having spent life on the street is that i think it's true to a point and then there comes a point where the leader who's expressing his power in service gathers together the people and there's still an admission that there's a group of people marx would call them not the proletariat the lumpin proletariat the pro the people below and that the tribe sort of looks at them and says you know what your ankles are all broken and your arms are broken and you don't even like anybody and you don't even want to help and we are going to actually have to walk on without you and and so that's where i've lost my christian miraculous thinking that says that everybody can be fixed and everybody can be part of it like that that that's that's supernaturalism you see the uh natural tearducts yeah that's why i am a christian that's why i use the word that's it because you want to hold on to that there is there is nobody unworthy yeah yep that's it that's the only core thing that makes me a christian and not a christian because you know that if you just go with the data you can still get to love yep you can still get to you can even get to as we've just done you can get to a certain level of social harmony but you can't save the psychopath yeah and i'm too old and too tired and i spent too much of my life actually looking the psychopath in the eye and i know that there are people you can't save and i spent my childhood being told i was one of them one of them really i was bullied kid and i was a learning disabled and both my peers and the institution said you don't have worth and you can't contribute and you're not welcome here and here's the thing like if there's anything i learned in the ghetto it's to calibrate my sense of who is beyond saving has nothing to do with how smart you are or how strong you are or how gifted you are but it does have to do with whether or not you are capable of caring about other people and there are people who through no fault of their own have been rendered incapable of responding relationally and if a tribe is understood as connection if somebody when somebody has lost the ability and the will and the desire to connect and that light has been extinguished and it cannot be relit when you come to that conclusion that's a person that i say like they are beyond a and i guess because i've encountered some people who that light had gone out uh you know so so the way that you were made to feel marginalized i go like that's a failure of imagination on somebody's part um but then there are these people and i think that sometimes i think if you have if you if you try to put together a theoretical system or if you try to design a building that would that can withstand every earthquake like that can withstand a nuclear strike added space you will design you you you will you will not design a building that is practical right the design that's too much to ask of a building or a bridge that can withstand a tidal wave that there comes a point which you say like the best system will be designed if you're willing to draw a line even a very generous line and say but below this line there are people that are that are beyond being included in our social in our social vision and like again like your social justice warriors are probably like they've pulled back out the knives and they're coming for me again and and and the weird thing is is like everywhere i go people think people think of me as a social justice warrior right but like i've been on the front lines long enough to know that there really are some people that if we're going to get down the field there are some people that we're probably going to have to not expend an unlimited amount of resources trying to bring along with us and and that i mean that gets it gets the medical care stuff where like there are there there are as a society there are there are children that are born that we spend colossal amounts of money trying to make viable um and there comes a point where like there may be you know and and our medical assistants well we never give up i think like at some point there has to be that line that you go like it's not viable enough you go like but but with enough money with another kid and i think there comes a point in a tribe where the that's part of the social contract is is that we don't force you to we don't we don't force on the one hand or allow you on the other hand to spend the entire like you know because like if you're the pr if you're the king of the united states and your kid's that kid you're like you know what we're gonna bankrupt we're gonna spend every dime in the coffers to save my kid and that's not socially responsible and that's not good for the species and that's not good for the tribe and so i got i i'm not a christian like like for for many reasons but even when we break christianity down to like just the line that you that you said i'm still not a christian yeah yeah that's fair and and and and and if i was you know like a tear could run down my eyes saying that because i go like that's a hard thing to give up is that purity but that's that's kind of what losing my faith in supernaturalism another way of describing that is losing my faith in purity well a it's been a long time since anyone could use the word purity in the same sentence as me so i'm chalking this whole discussion up as a huge win that's a huge yeah there you go besides mike his his ideals are very pure yeah yeah i don't know if this i like yeah that's so funny yeah but you are you know compared to me you're a purist yeah i'm yes i have a strange i'm pragmatic until you hit one of my remaining ideologies and then i'm always like oh my god evan i have an ideology yeah and i'm always real surprised by them they're there yeah they're there yeah yeah it's it's funny because like on some level of something because they were way up in the air here but like i've got a specific kid in mind i've got a guy in my old neighborhood named piedmont in mind like i'm thinking of people going like if if you reduce the world down to a lifeboat what do i do with p what do i what do i do with this little girl well i guess that's you know what do i do with these people if i'm in charge that's the short sadness of the species we should be taking a lot better care of the lifeboat you see what i mean oh yeah yeah like we're talking about like what's kind of more than water runs out there's no intrinsic thing that's making the fresh water run out other than the way we're functioning our societies and economies but like do you think this like i guess the thing is like you think the universe isn't has an intrinsic purpose oh i wouldn't say no no no to me like life life emerges it has an intrinsic tendency towards disorder but i would say like out of the chaos of the universe like life emerges like accident and then yeah like it's funny when i listen to your sort of testimony like video i was like i was with you until the last five minutes and the point at which you go like then there's no meaning except that which we create i'm like yeah you're part of the universe you're the like meaning emerges with sentient beings like there wasn't the universe had no meaning at all and then it did and there's a very real chance that the universe will return to having no meaning oh yes and then it may i wouldn't bet against it and then it may re-emerge again yeah but like i think that i think that meaning is is the we're the part of the universe that infects the whole thing with meaning you know we're the drop we're the drop of urine in this in the in the pure swimming pool yeah with a drop of meaning in the in the purely meaningless universe that make the whole thing because it's all related it's all connected so there's meaning in the universe as long as as long as somebody's thinking as long as somebody's feeling as long as somebody's relating right um but yeah i don't think we make it it you know and so and so my sense of meaning like and even to the degree that there's meaning in the universe now i'm meaningful to you you're like we're meaningful to each other yes like all meaning is relative all meaning is re like is relative or subjective or connected to to persons or to to to things and so to persons i don't mean to things like um and and so my friend um i have a friend who says that the problem is is that the only way humanity even makes it very much farther is if it re-enters into an eye vowel relationship with the universe that science has given us has has caused us to start to relate to the universe as a thing and that the the real wisdom of the mythologies wasn't that they actually described the physical universe was that they were clear clear and cogent reminders treat the lifeboat like a girl or like you know like right you know like like like call it her you know call the universe him but like personify it not because it's actually a person but because unless you treat it as a person you won't be here very long right which is an interesting we have strange brains yeah got a model of one over there yeah that'd be constantly reminded yeah yeah um yeah and so which is why i elect to personify the cosmos using the word god a volitional election yeah as to remind you of something that's important to trick my brain into behaving differently right like our our language shapes our are yeah if you call your car you'll treat it differently literally think my car is a glinist but if i call my car glennis then i'll treat my car differently um and so that's my using the word god isn't some theological claim it's a matter of brain tuning that's it and it's it's you know there's a book there that's uh the master and his emissary which i don't know if you've ever read but it talks about how the enlightenment shifts the overall balance of human brain activity towards the left hemisphere and that there are viable survival needs that are met by the holism of the right brain that right now spirituality addresses better than other types of of cognition or human thought and so my embrace of the luminescent of mysticism is an empirical practice of trying to re-bias my brain to use that right hemisphere more often um then why i mean i hear you yeah but then i i think of you talking to that church crowd on that video and when you tell the story of like standing at the beach in the water watching like which is a true story that i experienced i believe you yeah and i'm like oh he had an experience where the universe felt like a person yes right but when you tell it to them and they're clapping i feel like i know how they're hearing that story and they're not hearing it like we're talking it now um and that you know like and maybe that's the reason i mean maybe that's true maybe i feel on that same stage in a mega church i said i don't know if there's an afterlife you know what i mean like i'm i don't hide where i am i'm i'm very intentional no yeah believe me i know you're intentional about about the last i don't want people i don't want people to think i'm like the evangelical science savior that's going to make redeem a theistic god through science uh yeah so absolutely i can't control the way people receive my work but i am careful uh you're not trying to spin it i'm not trying to spin it i honestly my my last five years of my life have been a practice of being as absolutely honest rigorous yeah and rigorous in my public dialogue as i possibly can be so how's your wife doing because like with this like like you've re-embraced language you're tricking your brain but that also makes you easier for her to listen to she's probably less a believer than i am at this point and less a believer than she was when you first had this both of us much more my wife is an actual person um so her religious and spiritual identity are communal in nature so she tends to kind of just embody the center of gravity of whatever our social grouping is so when we were in the baptist church he she was a baptist and then we left the baptist church and she had an extreme sense of disenfranchisement because she had no community so then we joined the methodist church and at first she because she didn't feel socially involved she didn't the theology didn't relate to her but then as we became more and more methodist the more comfortable she came with eucharist again she's ever tried every tribe needs needs her right right my wife is the is that an example of what has kept this species viable she's the reason we're here um and that and i want to be very clear jenny is a bright person right she's very intelligent but she she doesn't deceive herself the same way i do and decide and pretending her beliefs are rational in nature right jonathan height the elephant in the brain or the elephant and the rider yes like the really smart person goes like hey i'm smart enough to know that i'm riding an elephant right you know it's it's only the idiot that goes like i'm steering this elephant i've for most of my life pretended the elephant wasn't there that's what i'm saying and she's just like yeah i'm on an elephant and i trust the elephant yeah i believe the elephant and the elephant wants to have friends wherever it is elephant wants to walk with other elephants yeah and so it's gonna it's gonna get in line it's gonna do that stuff and like you know what my elephant has been good to me yeah yeah yeah no that's the thing like and the weird thing is sometimes somebody thinks like if you're not thinking deep thoughts about like your eternal um your existential reality you know like it's like my wife like she doesn't work on that level as much either she can kind of go a lot of different ways that way depending on who she's with but like you know try to organize an event for 1500 people in a week and a half and she will put on an incredibly sophisticated kind of organizational thinking to make that event happen and you go like yeah she's not unintelligent she's just like she's willing to trust the elephant she has the intelligence that got us to civilization and kept it going the kind of like hyper prefrontal analytical obsessed reasoning that's only been a viable survival strategy like a industrial revolution post-industrial revolution at scale information economy certainly like the way i think is the aberration yeah um and and if resources get scarce well and i don't know if you ever read that book uh the brain at work but that talks about like different kinds of intelligences and that the like the the us senator looks at the waitress in the and and the shorter cook and thinks they couldn't do what i do but i could do what they do like like i'm you know like i just am not interested in in learning that and that my dad used to sometimes say that to me and finally i was like look you're completely wrong you couldn't do your secretary's job if you're literally if your life depended on it right it's a different kind of thinking right and the fact that yours is more highly rewarded in our society in no way means that that because you can do the more highly paid job you could also do the more lowly paid job i have never spent as much time and failed at something as i have trying to cook i've invested significant man-hours in trying to learn to prepare my own food and it's just not there to time four dishes or exactly yeah that that and she does it with an effortless grace yeah yeah um and that's what i mean like she she's my wife is a more viable homo sapien than i and coming back around to that like how do you build a community yes the most important person in a community is not necessarily the person who's in the leadership role as a matter of fact number ones are a lot easier to find than people who can cook for 50 people right right and and so but what but but there is a role in a community the person who throws the best party is not the best cook and not the best dj and not the best interior designer they're the person who's the best at getting the cook and the interior designer to see a vision for the party that they're trying to throw and get them to do their thing so it's a very specific role that the orchestra leader plays that that the institutional leader plays and they may not be as good at their job as all the people that are doing it for them but there's oh and that's the thing that that the post-christians are terrified of they're terrified of anyone being in that role and the key is is if the person in that role understands that they couldn't cook if their life depended on it they will be a much better leader of cooks if they understand that they that they don't know how to pick the songs that get people dancing they will they will communicate much better with the dj and so that like that's what i consider to be like the thing that i know how to do pretty well is i'm able to like talk about the party in such a way that you're like that sounds like a good party and then i'll be like and then i can like enlist people to do different things in it but i'm not really a good deliverer food music physical layouts and stuff like that you know and so like when i love the way you're talking about about jenny because it makes me feel like oh like that's the thing when you're standing up in front being the guy that everybody's focusing on if you think that makes you the most important person in your community then your community is in big trouble the irony of the ass science mic event on the ticket it says see science mike what i am intimately aware of those events happen because of people the audience never really encounters that's right you know what i mean it's uh my agent putting up the ticket sales together uh it's it's the volunteers at that church who got everything ready who you know what i mean and that when i was in corporate america and i was in management um i had imposter syndrome for a long time until i made the flip of like i'm not in charge because i'm the best at any of these things because i'm not i'm you're the best at being in charge my job is to help these people do the things they do yeah i'm i'm i'm a collective assistant to all these and and and that's that that's that beautiful sort of servant egalitarian leader thing but the thing that i the thing that i'm rebelling against now okay and i'm rebelling against is i'm not the best at any of these things but i am the best at being in charge and you know what just as you should not just as a person in charge should not look down at the cook and say we don't need to cook anyone could cook i could cook if i wanted to [ \_\_ ] but you know what the person who's the cook shouldn't say you know what we just need a dj and a cook we don't need anybody in charge we don't need anybody in charge of this thing like we can do this ourselves not true somebody that's another gift and and and people that are good at a lot of different things if a bunch of people get together and say like we've had bad people in charge so we're just not going to have people in charge you don't really need people in charge in a sense i feel like they're looking at me and saying hey bart people like you nobody needs you you're not valuable you're in fact you're the problem you're what screws up every group i've ever been a part of is the person like you i don't want a charismatic person i don't want somebody who's easy to listen to i don't want somebody who who like sees the room and feels the room like like we don't need it you know what i don't say that about the cooks i don't say that about the djs i don't say they're about the janitor why are you saying that about me you know and that and that's where i feel like a lot of the secular movement has been is you've got a lot of people out there that are like you know what we need scientists we need this we need that we need the other you go like what about the people that can create emotionally resonant experiences that remind us as to why we're wha wh why we need to care about each other you're like yeah we don't need that had enough of that i want to say like you know what i'm looking around right now college campuses looking a lot of depressed people a lot of anxious people a lot of lonely people a lot of people spend a lot of time on their computers not a lot of time face-to-face a lot of people that haven't developed empathy because there's no social context in which for them to like sort of see bump shoulders and see how they interact with you i'm going you know what i think maybe we do need some people to create some spaces where people see themselves as family and call each other brother and sister and talk about the the noble mission that we're on and you know like it's like i i like i'm unapologetic about that so long as the person doing that recognizes that they they can't they couldn't cook a meal if their life depended on it there has to be accountable leadership yeah leadership is dangerous when it veers into authoritarianism yeah and but that the problem is accountable accountable and removable removable and the the problem we have i think right now in many movements not just secularism is the conflation of authoritarianism and leadership yeah with fantastic cases why people conflate them but that doesn't mean leadership is a fundamentally flawed system or structure no no it doesn't and you know i think you know but you know it's one of the reasons i'm not a big fan of straight democracy right now because you know we were talking about like i'm just not sure that i'm not sure that given the sophistication of communication tools that are available to people right now um and that it's safe to just let people like the whoever gets the most votes gets to lead the country i'm thinking that maybe how else would you do it i don't know that's i don't know so like i share the concern yeah i can't think of a single well i think we're going to find out i think we're going to find out i think we're going to find out i mean because right now i mean we have we're already finding out like we don't have the people with the most votes went around the country we have what we have like it's not just to play on the electoral congress whoever gives them whoever has the most campaign finance right wins the election right now yes and uh and and you're seeing what you get every dollar gets a vote yeah you're seeing what you get when when when the people with the most wealth pick our pick our our leaders and so i think we've got to come up with something that's not the not the one and not the other um there has to be some way in which um yeah there i i i i have i i'm not that's where carl poppers like he's he's given me the goal but not the like i don't know how to get there i don't know how to get there but but i do know that like i think we're gonna find out because i think you're in the late stages of two-party democracy in the united states of america i totally agree yeah totally i think it's coming to an end and and probably should well if you don't want the other thing to come to an end if you don't like if you don't want the entire planet to come life on this planet to come to an end early then probably dem probably that kind of democracy needs to come to an end sooner than later yeah i agree yeah big problem and you know but i mean ultimately the the to me the great the great battle will be the people versus and i'm not i'm not talking about the people outside of corporations versus the people that run corporations i'm talking about humanity as a whole against an a structure that emerged called a multinational corporation that consumes not only all the resources of the planet but that consumes the very people that work for it like i don't think like corporations have taken on a life of their own and they are like people are talking about a.i as the enemy like ai there's going to be this huge force that like and they won't be human and they might like there is already a huge force and it is not human and it does not respect national boundaries and it does not care about the future it has no grandchildren and that like that to me is the great political struggle because i feel like the corporations have now have now taken control of government and they're more powerful than governments and they they choose governments and so the the only unifying principle in my politics is anti-corporatism yeah and i say that as someone who worked for a multinational yeah who do you work for oh you can't say it i'll just i'll just not include that in the podcast a multi-national i work for a multinational corporation and um he's writing it down right now no i'm kidding you know what you don't necessarily draw the ire or those beasts by naming them by name that's true they can shut you down in a heartbeat you know people are like oh you say so much so freely no i don't fear the church but companies they've they've got quite an arsenal yeah yeah i'm i'm very did you ever read that book when corporations ruled the world by david corton no i feel like i maybe could have written it but it's it was written like 25 years ago wow and it like all it's it's and it's it's it's

one of the it's one of those liberal

breathless

like too much too much but the core

understanding is like

this is what a corporation is yep and

this is why it is

unaccountable and dangerous it's

really a really interesting book ahead

of its time yeah because 25 years ago we

were just getting into like

corporations are amazing

so yes it's funny because like for years

like i was like there's only one

political issue that matters in the

world and that's campaign finance

and if you lose on campaign finance

you've lost everything

and i sort of feel like we have lost on

campaign finances on campaign finance

yeah

so and we are in the process of losing

everything as a result

on that bleak note yeah

so i sat often talked to groups of

pastors at their request

because they're a discouraged bunch um

when i talk to pastors it's either

evangelicals who i'm meeting with in

secret

or mainline pastors who they're trying

to tell

every millennial within 150 miles of

their church

we like science mike too uh but what

they should all share in common

is an overwhelming sense of

discouragement

and so what i always tell pastors who

are

very often deeply concerned by

secularism who part of my work is like

hey christians

secularism is not your enemy

i always tell them

don't worry there's no secular answer to

pastoral care

the way that the work you do that's most

powerful

is hospital visits and funerals

and facilitating people gathering

together and what i have heard today

is i've been lying yeah and i'm really

excited about that

so i hope that you

continue to be successful and that more

people

in the the secular movement understand

the need

for your role in human society because

detached from

the violence of exclusionary theology

i feel like pastoral care is freed to be

its point of highest value and

contribution to society yeah

pastoral care prophetic speaking

like emotionally resonant music

like the idea of saying hey the data has

shown us

that the people that thrive and that

cause others to thrive are always the

same

they're always people that have a

handful of loving relationships

that that are doing work that

on some level they believe makes things

better for other people

and that's why they're doing it and who

religiously or regularly cultivate

a sense of gratitude and a sense of

wonder

a sense of like standing in awe of

something bigger than themselves and

feeling part of something bigger than

themselves like

that experience of being over awed of

being full of wonder of

of marveling at your hand or

or or a sunset people that have those

things

like those are the ones that thrive and

pastoral care

and speaking and music

and youth work and book writing and

podcasting but the idea that like

that and anything that we do

that enables people to build loving

relationships

that creates a context where people can

find that those kind of

relationships and then and it creates a

context where they can

do that work and be encouraged in that

work and be reminded that in

in the face of a society that says that

your work is valuable if it is

well paid says no no actually your work

is valuable if you're making

people's lives better like whether

you're a scientist or

or or a waitress like there's a way

and that are getting together and

swapping books

and swapping songs and looking at slides

and showing

going on hikes and sort of saying like

isn't it amazing to be a conscious

sentient human being

like like when you figure out when i

tell you the story of how your finger

came to work

you're going to just your head's going

to explode with joy

and so like pastoral care is like

helping people stay in that and

good music is is helping people stay in

that

and you know good podcasting is helping

people stay in that

and i'm i'm just i'm just really

i'm very grateful to the people that

steered me in your direction

because i

i think it's always so encouraging when

we find some

when we find somebody who's in our in

our

in our space but also like for me what's

as encouraging to me about you

is the fact that so many people are

responding like that's just

really exciting because

you and i both know that they're not

they're not resp i mean part of them is

responding to you as a person

but part of them is responding to an

approach

right that they recognize and they go

there's hope there

there's life there um and there's and

there's nobody telling me i have to

believe something that's frankly

unbelievable there

and um yeah something like i'm

encouraged are you encouraged i'm super

encouraged i'm super encouraged my hope

is that they're much more responding to

an approach than a person but

um but i am encouraged but but when i'm

like like not to

not to take a good ending and wreck it

but like what i'm telling you is like

it's okay if they're responding to a

person throughout history

the way this stuff gets done

is people

articulate vision totally and other

people come around it

and are taking and actualize that vision

and then if those people get crazy we

get rid of them but like

it's okay that they're responding to you

as a person

that's all people have ever responded to

yeah but i mean

have you seen hamilton no miranda's

hamilton

it's amazing it's not overrated no

matter what you've heard

no that i'm hearing you it's incredible

uh and there's a line in there um where

he's talking about

um the song is about the the compromise

to move the capital it's called in the

room where it happens

um and he says i want to create

something that's going to outlive me

is the line and um

so even though you know people were

enraptured with alex

alexander hamilton the person the idea

of this kind of market economy

long after no one knew who he was kept

going i loved him and so

i am comfortable being a stand-in for

the idea for now

but i will be very disappointed if my

work is just

associated with my identity and my body

and my voice

50 years from now yeah no i mean it's

funny a lot of my evangelical friends

the older ones yes

they're in a lot of pain right now

because

the idea that they gave their lives to

is a looking like it might not outlive

them but worse than that

is looking like the form in which it is

outliving them

is ugly yeah and it's very painful to

have given your life to a movement

and to see that movement go off the go

off the trail yeah

um and so i i know a lot of people that

they're feeling like

what was my work about and what i end up

keep saying to them is like look within

your work

there were people that you went to the

hospital

there were people that you introduced to

their husbands or their wives

there there's work there's people that

were inspired to live meaningful lives

like

like the fact that it all gets if your

movement doesn't

outlive you there was still something

there but it's very painful

when you see your movement go in the

wrong direction it's really hard

um yeah yeah i you know

yeah it's you know i one of the things i

sometimes think is like

i love like i had this bike crash where

i almost died

and when i came back i had that classic

experience of like the food tasted

better

and the air was sweeter and like every

day

and like i kept waiting for that to go

away

because you know people tell you like it

goes away

and it never did like

because i embraced secularism on the

other side of that sure and

and that turned me on let brought in a

whole bunch of other stuff it's like

i just keep being wowed but like i love

this life so much

like i love like eating and i love

meeting a friend

and like you know people are listening

to us and start going like oh wow

these guys are like they're discovering

that they like each other yeah you're

like yeah that's

absolutely true and uh i love having sex

with my wife

it's really something extraordinary and

like she was sick for a long time i

didn't think we might ever do that again

and then we did like every time we do it

it's like i never thought that would

happen again

wow um and so if you say to me like bart

there's this outside chancellor because

this podcast that you and mike did

somebody will hurt and they'll live a

little bit differently and that'll put

the planet on just a slightly different

trajectory

and like one more kid will get born

somewhere

with an opportunity to grow up

and fall in love and get married and eat

food

and have sex and all stuff i go like

and you won't be there man your your

existence will be gone

you will have been reabsorbed into the

universe and and your id

like you'll you'll but like

does that what's that worth if you're

not there and i go like oh

just thinking about it now makes me

excited now

right so the future the possibility of

that future

impact makes this moment

more beautiful like isn't that a

beautiful thought that that somewhere

there might be a person

that will experience life because of

what we did

and they go like that's how my plumber

friend you know needs to feel

that's that's how that's how

you know a waitress needs to feel like

like maybe i'm encouraging somebody and

because of me

they'll live a little bit differently

and maybe because they teach differently

that kid will become an ambulance driver

and that ambulance driver will save this

person

and this person will end up meeting this

person and they'll get married to that

person and they'll have this kid

and that kid will have a life that's

worth living

and if you like if you like people say

like don't you aren't you scared of

dying and i go like yeah

i mean like i guess not really i used to

be

this but don't you love life and they're

like yeah yeah i don't just

love my life i love the whole thing

and so like the thing that scares me

is life dying that that's the thing that

i

that that makes me think like can we

work a little harder

we do a little more yeah love a few more

people yeah

you know because like this thing

that we're doing this consciousness

even when it's terrible

people scratch and claw to get another

minute of it

because it's that wonderful you know i

mean like it's so precious

and so yeah like i'm you know like

if if they're attracted to you as a

person

if they're attracted these ideas like

whatever it is that's happening

the fact that all these people are

being moved

to try harder to love their lives

get out of here that's a big deal best

job in the world

no it really is it really is yeah it

really is

i would love to know what you thought

about this episode if you'd like

conversations like this in the future if

you'd like them shorter

or if if you know just letting a free

form conversation go as long as it needs

to

uh worked for you just let me know you

can do that in the comments on this

episode on asksciencemike.com

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design and jeb botteford for writing the

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and i'll talk to you next week