When Ideas Meet Reality — Economics, AI, and Fasting | Jay Richards

I tell you something?

And I reckon that is that when I'm writing about economics and other things that, especially economics, people have lots of mental pictures in their imagination that I think blocks them from just sort of thinking this passionately about the nature of economic reality, you know, And so that's always fraught. I can say it's less controversial than the stuff I've been working on the last five years. It's just general ideology,

which is existential and obviously much more controversial. But then topics like fasting, which I love, right that's a lot less controversial, but still, you know, most people kind of have a lot of misconceptions about it, actually, m hm.

your mind about something? I changed my mind about something usually I hate to say it. I wish I were just sort of entirely dispassionate. And I said, Okay, how much do I actually know about this? Okay, it's like one percent of what I probably should know. So I'm going to study all the best representatives on all sides, or if I can't find a good representative of position, I'll steal man it myself. Try to come up with the best argument I can think of for a position I disagree with.

I mean, if somebody googles me. I've written on a lot of different topics, but in most of those cases was because I decided to look into something and realize, okay, wait, there's a lot more here. And in some cases it would be oh wow, I was completely off base and you know, need to totally change my mind on this, even if it's inconvenient. Other cases, you look into it, it's like, wow, the arguments for this are actually much

better than I realized. And so you never kind of know going in if you're going to be serious about investigating a topic. And I think to seriously investigate a topic is to be willing to put yourself in a position to say okay, got to be willing to say a position I disagree with is that it's possible that it's true. You know, you don't have to assume it's true, but it's possible it's true. And what would count in its favor, what kind of evidence account its favor? If

you can't do that, you might be right. It's possible that you just landed on all the correct opinions, right,

That's certainly a possibility, but it's unlikely. And the fact that I myself have ended up on different sides of issues based upon my own study is a reminder to me that, Okay, we're fallible beings, and there's sometimes I mean, you know, in God's grace, you might just be born into a family that's already thought these things through, you know, and you can just sort of take that for granted.

But in some ways, even your own intellectual confidence usually requires that at some point as an adult, you look into these things. But you know, especially in an age of social media, in which I'm more and more convinced

at social media, especially you know, social media apps and the kind of infinite scroll capacity and then the algorithm that sort of gives you more of what you like. It's highly addictive. It's just works against careful deliberative thought. Because it you know, it stimulates us psychologically and you know,

I mean literally sort of boosts particular hormones. And so I think this has never been more crucial that people have some kind of internal method that they follow in order to try to come to your views honestly and carefully when when needed, and just don't be caught sure of things you haven't looked into.

on social media. I mean, I'm sorry. Yeah, I spend a number of hours on X, but it's still not a large segment of the population, and you know, they'll be thinking major controversies that are happening on X, which I'm sort of the middle of at different times. But then I'll talk to somebody else and it's like, yeah, I didn't really hadn't heard about that. In fact, I often use my sister, one sibling, my sister who we grew up in Texas. She stayed in Texas. She's plugged

into politics and stuff, but she's not hanging out on AX. Yeah, she's got a job to do. And I kind of use her to as a test. Okay, how deeply into you know, the broader conversation has this gotten? And if she's totally aware of it, it's like, okay, it's gotten deeper. But if it's some kind of in house sort of dispute on X, you know, it's like you got to realize, Okay, talk to some people that aren't plugged into that and

find out, yeah, how how far it is. And then as you know, colleagues thatd say, go touch grass and

look at the blue sky, get outside, right, I mean so many of them don't in the blue skuy if it exists, right, I've got it right here outside my window and I hardly even look out there, right. But yeah, I mean this there's so many I think of our sort of maladies these days could certainly for young people, could be solved by kids spending three months working on a ranch shoveling manure. I mean, honestly, you touch the material reality, remind yourself of your embodiedness, right, and not

the digital thing. And I say that to somebody who you know, I see all the kind of benefits from this technology, including what we're doing right now. But every technology has its ups and its downs, and the more powerful it is, the more severe the downs could be.

happening now. The book was really a defense of the human person and not this dystopian vision, not this kind of anti technology screed, but like, look, there are lots of technologies that are going to be coming online in the next few years, are going to change our lives. We're going to change the way we work. It is not going to replace us as humans. Human beings are not machines, so machines can't replace us. It will just change the types of work we do. More things get automated.

But you know, this was you know, kind of realization, because what's happened if you were to say, okay, so what distinguishes like say, the information economy from the service or the industrial economies went before, well one is called digitization. This is what the kind of uh information economy economists

talk about. And so it's moving from the world of molecules to the world of bits, in which more and more things that before you thought of, okay they need to have a physical manifestation can actually be converted into bits. That is the kind of the language of software. So you know the way we consume music, right Initially it was literally had to have a music, you know, the musicians in front of you, and then we figured out

how to record it. At one point in my own lifetime as a little kid, I was listening to my mom's LPs. Uh the you know, the vital discs, and then you're like, what is that? Yeah, exactly these, And then we went to a thing called eight track tapes, which was a terrible technology. That was a transition to cassettes, and then it went to CDs. Where are we now, Well,

I haven't bought a CD. I can't remember the last time I bought a CD because everything is streamed and so it's just this it's a fully digital kind of manifestation of something that you know initially had to be physical. And so that's when we realize that, Okay, that's the nature of the information economy. Is that movement. But we live in the world of molecules. Right, we have bodies, uh, you know, we're you know, we have things in common

with other organisms in our environment. And so if we get too detached from that fundamental human reality that we are embodied. God has created us as the these sort of unique material spiritual hybrids that are fully fully material and fully spiritual, you can put it that way. And anything that sort of that alienates us from that, there's gonna be some cost to it, and we got to become aware of it. Doesn't mean you can't use your

computer again. It probably means you need to buy intention do things to cultivate and remind yourself that your embodied. Yeah.

all of that. It's what you're saying. It's intentionality, it's okay, instead of listening to whatever the algorithm thinks that I want, and it could be dangerously good. It's unbelievable, and you discover and it's so hard because you discover things. There are bands that I've discovered via the algorithm that it says, you know what Dave based on your listening, I think you'd like this, And I say, you're right, that's great. I never would have discovered that on my own.

ever hear it again. And you record it, you sort of freeze that in place, right, so you're able to remove the experience of the listening from that kind of physical origin point. And so we're already sort of moving in that way. But there is something I think profoundly different about the kind of radical digitization combined with radical connectivity too, that that just you know, these are these things are beneficial, but they can also amplify all of

our sort of worse aspects. I mean, it's just like the more connected and the more you can communicate with other people, the easierness to communicate the evil plans, right, And so that's just that's always true. But I think it's especially important now that people have a good anthropology and a good metaphysics because so much of the debate about artificial intelligence and transhumanism it's a proxy war for people's metaphysical differences, and so the materialist has a particular

take on this. Theists and Christians ought to see it differently, but sometimes they themselves don't know how to sort of translate their theological views into this kind of complicated technical zone. But I think there's never been a time in which having good metaphysics is necessary for sort of analyzing technological trends.

this later, but I since we're in it. Yeah, how do you use AI, because I know you use it?

And the search engines themselves were amazing. I still remember my first Google search around I don't know, nineteen ninety nine or two thousand and the ais by which these days, when people say AAIs they're mainly referring to the chatbots,

even though search engines are a form of AI. But they're so good, and they were good even when they were hallucinating a lot right at the beginning, because they are so good with natural language that everyone's recognized, Okay, the capacity to be able to use natural human language

like a human. That's a high bar. Because even though we have the rules, of course, there's grammatical rules and spelling rules, it can be easily delineated, there's just a lot more going on when two humans, you know, two conscious agents are communicating. And so it's tempting to think, okay, now we're reaching a point in which our technology it's getting more like us. Right before, Okay, a tractor. That's not like us. That's right, Maybe that replaces a job

for an oxygen. But you know, well the mental stuff and the intellectual stuff that seems like it's like us, and so it seems sort of scary, but it's easy to forget that. Okay, those chatbots, how did they get so good? They got so good because they have this massive amount of data that it can be trained on, and all of that data was produced by human beings, intelligent agents, every webpage, every journal article. It's just really good at running the statistics and you know, under discovering

underlying patterns we might not have noticed. And then of course the systems themselves are are designed by software engineers. They're optimized or tweaked, and so humans are still all over this, and so again it's just another tool, but it's a very it's a very amazing and sophisticated tool. And so I would say at the moment, my main use for the for the chatbots is for research. I know, that's that's actually kind of a really low level thing. I don't use it to write by papers or something

like that. I will ask it, okay, find the most authoritative and most cited reference on this topic and it'll find it. I mean, it's just like that can help you summarize. It's just really really powerful, and so it's it's qualitatively different from the experience of search engines, which just kind of give you a list of other sides. And so, I mean, the reality is, if everyone else is using these chatbots and you're not, you're basically foregoing the use of a tool that would make you much

better at probably what you're doing. At the same time, that tool is really good for cheaters, right that want to just you know, it's like the days of a professor giving an essay exam and then just having it turned in are probably over. You've got to have checks and balances. That might just mean that, okay, you got to go back to blue book exams where they're you know, you've written out, or to oral exams or you know, and then that's which is actually really a better test

of knowledge anyway, but it's much more labor intensive. And so I mean, it's it's important to remember that we're just a couple or three years in to these chatbots and they're already amazing. Imagine what they're going to be like in ten years.

the question, because they just presuppose. Like in the whole sort of artificial intelligence debate, there's this idea of the hard problem of consciousness. How do you account for first person perspective or that our thoughts are about things. That's not a molecules aren't about things, but our thoughts are about things, right, And so anybody that's gonna deal with this stuff has to have some way of dealing with that. Well.

The way the authors of the book deal with it is just to comply ignore it and just talk about computers choosing things and determining and preferring and having opinions and deciding and doing all the things that agents do. But they never justify that these things could ever be conscious, intelligent agents, which is so they just beg the biggest philosophical question of all And I think that's the that's the problem with so many people that worked in this area.

On the one hand, if you ask them, okay, what's happening under the hood, it's like, okay, it's actually fairly simple. I forget if it was Gary Wolferm or someone that wrote a little book about like what's happening with chat GPT, And in terms of describing it, it's actually really not

that complicated. What it does is complicated. But if you yourself have a bad metaphysical view of the human person, so you think we're ultimately machines, you think that human beings ultimately are reducible to physics and chemistry and a simple process such as natural selection, right, and we became conscious through these kind of processes, and our agents, Well, there's no reason that we couldn't design machines that do the same thing. That's the kind of that's the sort

of leap. And if you press them, they'll they'll sometimes downgrade us and say, well, who's to say we're conscious? Maybe that's an illusion. Right, So you can see how again metaphysics, if you don't have the right metaphysics, you're going to get freaked out by this, because they really do. The guys at Google, they think they're in the process of building a general artificial intelligence, which won't even really

it won't be artificial artificial, it'll be an intelligence. And if you think that you're doing that, and you think that makes sense it is possible, you would you should fear it. That's terrifying. Right. On the other hand, I think, actually, if we want to really anticipate the bad stuff that can happen, we need to decide what things not to worry about. And so the set of things not to

worry about include things that are impossible. Right, So if it's not possible for a machine to be turned into a person, right at least, you know, without supernatural powers. Then we don't need to worry about that. We don't need to worry about Skynett waking up, hating us and killing us. It's got the problems are going to be someplace else, and that's not waste your time on this. A lot of the technologists here, because they have bad metaphysics.

I think they waste time worrying about these things that don't make any sense philosophically. Hmm.

sort of tweaking. It's a you know, statistical process involving massive amounts of computational power trained on data that was written by intelligent agents. That's what's happened. And so I don't think in this case you don't need to invoke something like that. It's not like you know, that hideous the end of that hideous strength, right, or it's his head is really getting demons are being channeled. Yeah, so that's that. Again, that's not something I worry that much about.

I do think that that demonic forces are involved in, you know, all of our activities, But I don't think that you need to invoke that if you sort of know a little bit about what's actually happening under the hood with these technologies.

figure out exactly how to do it. I had it before, but I saw, oh, the program has a co creator, an AI co creator. All right, so I said, hey, can you make me this little clip? I'm all it erased my entire day's work.

way in an email because it sound bad. And so I, you know, you habituate yourself, and so I try to write like I would write to a person, although I have absolutely no temptation to think that that's really a person anymore than I think it's really a person giving me my answers to a Google query. And so I think that's good. It's just why. It's the reason you shouldn't use a bunch of profanity in private, right because then when you get mad in public, it's it's going

to come out where creatures have it. So I think it's a good thing. And then you know, the ais themselves have been optimized for different things. So I know a Claude, which is by the companies called Anthropic, I know that Claude. From the beginning, they wanted the AI to really be optimized for de escalating. So in other words, if you're asking it questions and you're getting very, very agitated, it tries to give you more careful, nuanced answers to

kind of draw you back from the brain. And they tell you that that's and so you'll notice that it's doing that. That's actually that seems like a noble thing. You know, it can maybe misused or something. But they thought, okay, we don't want this to amplify anger online, and so we're in our in our chatbot, we're just going to make it so that it de escalates, you know, and and it can tell when you're getting agitated, you know, based on I suppose the grammar and the if you

use all caps or something like that. But you know, but then again that is it has these properties because of the choices of engineers, and the engineers themselves are intelligent persons made in the image of God, who can choose things. And the problem is is that because we use so much metaphorical language with our technology. Even the

fact that we call it artificial intelligence, that was a marketing plan, right, that was literally people came up with that term precisely to get us to imagine it in that way. If we had called it, you know, I don't know, advanced statistical algorithms or something like that, right, would be less tempted intelligence. But they got the name artificial intelligences are now you know, we're off to the races.

something like tech realism. And so I would say I'm like, just one click toward the optimist, but in the tech realist space, because I do think that we it's generally a good thing that we can build tractors, you know, or build computers, because it actually these are expressions of human creativity. They're part of the mandate, the odds command be fruitful and multi apply and fill the earth and

subd it. So our fecundity, you know, biologically and having children and our fecundity and creating those are both in themselves expressions of the fact that we're image bearers, but we're falling, and so that that's sort of fractured but because I think of technology that way, it's a sort of intellectual prosthesis of human creativity. I think, Okay, I give it kind of a benefit of the doubt, but let's look really, really carefully at the ways in which human sin can distort these things.

how do we avoid that? Because I feel like the line is.

I'm using it to amplify what I would do anyway, which is research and write those sorts of things. On the other hand, if you don't have that it can you might use it like it's sort of just live your life inside a gaming universe with you know, the oculus goggles on, and you use it because you feel like your life is not fulfilling, and so you spend all of your time in this imaginary digital world. And you know, if you're asked to write a letter or to write something, you just use the AI to do

it for you. And so if you have any skill, it's figuring out how to query to get the right answer right that. I think that's quite possible. I don't think it'll be quite as stark as Thompson describes it, but it's memorable because it's like these sort of two things. Just as people predicted that. You know, they'll always say, well, there's this massive hollowing out of the middle class and you get like a few super rich and then everybody's poor.

That's actually not true. I mean, if you just actually look at the statistics. It's not true that the middle class has disappeared. There's still vast majority of people are in the middle class. There are some ultra rich, you know, billionaires like Elon Musk with over one hundred billion dollars. But I think that in general, these technologies, as long as they're deployed properly, will create value. Value is created in an economy or wealth that ends up having an

effect for lots of people. Because it's it's like Elon Musk, I can't remember what's not worth is. Maybe it's let's just say it's three hundred billion, which you know, or something like that. He's staggering. He's not sitting on three hundred billion dollars worth of gold, right. All of that is assets that are deployed and being created. And so I don't think there's any reason to think we won't have something like that. I do think there'll be these

kind of first major, first mover advantages. Musk again a perfect example. He and a few guys started PayPal. He took that money and he parlated into Tesla. He owns the boring company. Right, of course, he has SpaceX, the robotics that he's developing. The satellite you know, email and internet satellites that he's deployed everywhere, practically in orbit around

the Earth. Notice what he's done is he's basically taking on and developing technologies in these areas that he imagines are going to be part of the future, and that also serve a role in getting us to Mars. Almost every one of these, right has something to do with that particular goal. But you know, it's very hard to say, well, he's the only beneficiary of that. I mean, having self driving Tesla cars. He's not the only beneficiary of that in Iran. If you're only access to the INN is

because he's turned on you know, Skylink. That's beneficial to other people as well. So I don't think there's no reason to think we'll have this dystopian Healscape with twelve super elites enjoying this stuff and everybody just sitting in their version of the matrix. It's a really good image, though, to help clarify, Okay, let's do what we need to do to make sure that nothing like that happens.

the eighteen thirties, it was nothing like that. The thing that stood out to him wasn't a bunch of isolated individuals. It was these voluntary associations in which these little towns and communities would build up. And the first thing and do is build a church and a school for everyone, and they have community groups. And he noticed how communal, like spontaneously communal Americans were, and so that's always been I think a stereotype. And then the warmness of collectivism. Okay,

so what are you talking about? So collectivism is sort of vague? Is Soviet communism or maybe like under stalin is that what we're talking about? Are you're talking about a family? Right, that's a community of persons. It's supposed to invoke all those things. It's what it's really designed to do is to get you to imagine that what ends up looking a lot like Stalinism is more like the family. And so it's entirely designed to trade on our kind of mental images of what these things are.

And so if you're, say a right winger and you believe the rugged individual myth, you're going to find it insulting. And if you're on the left and you like the idea of collectivism, you're gonna like it. And also, by the way, you hate rugged individualism. Neither of these things is actually an accurate description of the American experience or American culture, because if you associate, for instance, a market

economy with rugged individualism. Well, people's well being is much greater in market economies, all things being equal, than in any kind of command economy. But really, I just think we need to think beyond these stereotypes. And we were talking about different political economies. You got to talk about

all the details. Is the rule of law as or state that's functional but isn't overly powerful, so that you have things that a society that recognizes and respects are genuine individualities, creatures made the image of God with intrinsic rights as the declaration of independences and responsibilities, but also recognizes and respects our communal reality, the family, the church, local environments, as opposed to flattening everything out so that

it's just isolated individuals related to the state. We asked the question that way, right. It's more complicated and subtle and not good for a politician stereotype, but it clarifies what we actually should want and what we don't want. One of the things that we don't want is an overly centralized decision decision making apparatus in which things are

decided coercively when they didn't need to. Because in a sense, you could think of the role of the state, as if the state's doing what it ought to do, that's the domain of coercion, right, and the limits actually the use of violence. Well, it'd be nice if as much as possible could be decided to liberatively or voluntarily rather

than coercively. Collectivism, at least in its socialist and communist manifestations, basically just puts absolutely everything in the hands of the state, and so it reduces all social relations to the relation of government and subject, in other words, power. And this is unfortunately, we don't learn these lessons. Everybody that's you know, under forty has no memory of the Cold War, so they don't really remember what's at stake, and so the

same dumb kindness from my youth. Socialist stereotypes keep emerging, precisely because like the word socialism, right, it sounds nice. It's got the word social and it isn't that good? What do you want an Yeah, those are your options to see how this goes, right, But okay, yeah, but that's just a word and a mental picture. R. Let's look at the way this actually works in real in

real practice. Yeah.

Marxist revolutionary violent interpretation. I just thought, you know, something like democratic socialism that you have kind of had different.

Actually two really important things happened early. Somebody had given me a little six pack book of C. S. Lewis's most popular little books like Mere Christianity and The Great Divorce, you know, and miracles in those books, which I ended up in my bookshelf and reading. But the other thing

is I would go to the library every morning. I had, like, you know, an eight am class, and then I have an eleven am class, and so between that I would go to the library and I would read the periodicals physical magazines which used to exist, And I read National Review, which was known to be the kind of conservative, you know,

sort of periodical. And then this publication called The New Republic that was considered the liberal publication, so not radical but liberal, right, So they're perfect kind of mirrored each other. And through National Review, I read this guy named Thomas Soule, ended up reading a bunch of his books. He's an American economist, and just realized, Okay, I really didn't have any idea what I was talking about in economics, and so I just changed mind on a lot of those things.

Was it that my intuitions changed or my moral convictions? It's just that I thought, Okay, a market economy with the rule of law in which prices can range freely is just much better for human flourishing than all the known alternatives. And that's really what Money Greeting God is about, is to try to help others that really to help Christians that are kind of confused on these things to get clear in their minds, because I think actually most of what you need to know about economics it has

to do with these kind of intuitions. It's not the technical stuff you learn in a macroeconomics class. And so that's really what the book was about. Two thousand and nine, it had a manifestation, and then I tweaked it a little for the ten year anniversary edition. But I think, you know, arguments are basically the same, though I made some tweaks in the newer edition.

a translator. So take stuff that's trapped in kind of academic jargon and literature and translate it for a general educated audience that might be able to do something with it. And so that's why I tend to be in that space. And it requires you to figure out, Okay, how do you write in a way that's non technical. I can tell you that. You know, it takes you bet For me,

it was like twenty years. I go back and I look, okay, I've got I got much better at that, you know, the last few years than I was twenty years ago. It's like read something from twenty years ago. I'm like, man, it's a terrible writer. I can't believe that they published this thing.

something that I am genuinely curious about.

not interested in. But if I'm interested in it, you know, I could absolutely burrow. And so writing books, for instance, I need time where I can actually do that. If I have to do it in fifteen minute increments, it's really hard. But I don't exactly have an average day. You know, if I'm speaking and I'm traveling, I can tell you I make the most of plane rides. I do some of the most a lot of my writing actually on planes. I won't I won't purchase the Wi Fi.

I'm just sitting there, and so that ends up not being dead time for me. It's the it's the commute to the airport and getting on the plane that's actually dead time. I listen to a lot of audiobooks. I do have this practice in which I decide at the beginning every year that I'm going to study a particular topic that year, a new topic, one kind of just topic of interest that I don't know much about. I'm

going to pick and different years. In fact, my book on fasting was kind of the result of me having decided that some years ago, and so that you know, it kind of keeps you current. I'm hoping it will keep my brain working longer than it would otherwise, but you do. I mean, you do have to be efficient with your time. You have to be sort of deconing

about the things that you do and don't do. But I actually think if you're just genuinely really interested and curious about things and have a pretty good research methodology, you should get a lot accomplished. But don't. As a writer, I always say, ILL never going to write a book if it's already been written, And so when you have people have book ideas, I always say, okay, make sure there isn't already a good book that somebody else wrote, because then it's not needed. And so that's you know.

But I honestly think I've cobbled this together over a long period of time and had the good fortune for many years of just being in a think tank realm, so I didn't, you know, it's like getting to write and do research and speak. But I don't have the burdens of a college professor position. I was a college professor at Catholic University for some years and really loved it.

But I do think if you have lots of meetings and lectures you have to get during the day, it's going to be much harder for you to write book link things. And so I've got faculty friends who really somebody needs to buy them out of teaching in order for them to write a book. And so that's sort of natural. But what's funny is that I do think people that don't write, or that who would like to write,

they imagine certain things. They imagine that, well, there's you get this muse that's going to just carry you and you know, and if you're not feeling it, then okay, you got to try to do that. They don't want to just accept that. No, rite think about writing as carpentry, in which you just have to show up and start cutting some wood. Right, write something down, don't wait for the inspiration. Sometimes you get that and you'll flow. But the best way to ever get to that is to

just force yourself to do it. I think people want to think that it's some kind of magical process where they have to be inspired. In fact, it's like no, lots of writing is just putting in the work. Yeah, putting in the work.

to the whole holistic human experience mind, body, and soul. And a lot of the time people wouldn't think about fasting in terms of the benefits for mind and soul, right because we've largely stopped fasting, yes, exactly, and Christians were at the forefront of this. Why did Christians stop fasting?

to be. So it's not just like, oh yeah, well, that's interesting if you look at the Christian calendar, certainly in the liturgical tradition, so a Roman Catholic, Eastern Right and Eastern Orthodoxy still very much follow a liturgical calendar, and the Anglicans do too. We have feast days and solemnities, we have these penitential times like Lent and add but were detached historically from the way these things were practiced.

Let's say, for the first thousand years of Christian history, in which fasts were real fasts where people didn't eat food part of the time, right, and then feasts through real feast, and then the rest of the time you're starve eating modestly. So for most of human history, people do not have access to any kind of food that they wanted twenty four to seven like we do now, right, And so by necessity they had to do this. They had to. There was simply because of the availability food.

There would be times during the year when you didn't have a lot of access to food and you'd eat less other times. If you're going to have a feast day, think about this. Imagine you're a farmer and you know and have a few animals, and you're just above subsistence and you have a major feast coming. Well, subsistence means you're just producing just about enough to keep yourself alive.

How are you ever going to have a feast? You're only ever gonna have a feast if you forego some of the stuff you'd otherwise have consumed so that you could have it for the feast day. Right. So that was a that was a kind of just a basic economic reality for humans for most of history, and so right, that would be true even if you didn't have a

sort of church calendar on top of it. And so in some ways, what the church calendar and the punctuation of feasts and fast did is it formalized what was before just a kind of basic biological reality in which humans had these times where there was plenty and times when there was want. Now, what we initially think is okay, well, yeah, so God must we must be designed so that we can go a while without food. And that's what the

fat storage is about. That we can eat a bunch and we'll store up some fat on our bodies and then if we end up in a survival you know, starvation situation, we will use those. But that's not good. I mean, it would not be good to go two days without eating. That's just something that okay, you can survive it. Well, I think the evidence strongly suggests, and I argue that in fact, we are better off physically

if we do these things. It's not just a spiritual benefit, but in fact God designed us for this kind of punctuated way of eating, and by losing both the necessity of having to do that and losing the liturgical manifestation of it. We're actually worse off. We're worse off spiritually because fasting, you know, the New Testament is paired with almsgiving and with prayer. That's bad, but we're also worse

off spiritually. We are more insulin resistant. Our body doesn't know what to do with extra calories, so at stores of them rather than burning them. Our brains don't actually

work all that well for certain metamolic reasons. So in other words, for complicated reasons having to do with abundance of food and the fact that people don't really like fasting and it's not anyone's financial interest to promote fasting, right, we slowly, I call it the death of by a thousand dispensations, just slowly made fasting less and less rigorous intell for most Christians. It's at best a kind of

symbolic things. So for Catholics. Catholics, okay, see you fast on you know, on Good Friday, fast on Ash Wednesday, but fasting just means basically eating less that day than you would otherwise. And then you fast for an hour before Mass, which means if you shower before Mass you could pass. Right, It's really only the Eastern traditions, honestly that still really kind of retain good bits of this.

I think in the book. I'm trying to remember if I use the East, I think it's the East Ethiopian Orthodox fasting schedule from the year when I was writing the book. It's like half the days have some kind of either fast or an abstinence from some kind of food. And I just the argument of the book is that we will be better off and are better off spiritually, emotionally, mentally,

and physically if we integrate this into our lives. And it is a massive, massive loss not just to our health, but to the spiritual power and well being of Christians to have mostly abandoned this really really important spiritual practice. So that was a longer answer that I meant to give, but that was at least the impetus behind the book.

and it's not only I have. I had this theory, and then I researched and turns out that it's not just anecdotally true, it's it's manifestly true that a lot of people who go to prison convert to Islam for the ascetic practices.

your book about the individual benefits. But what is lost for the church community at large when we've ceased to fast together?

So just doing those things together, by definition, is going to be greater than doing it individually. It's also, frankly, much easier. Or imagine if it's the entire church, or imagine if it's an entire country like Crete, in which

kind of everyone just sort of does these things. Well, if everyone is abstaining from meat, or extaining from alcohol, or abstaining from eating altogether, that's much easier than if you're having to constantly be with people you know, not doing it because you have to, you have to constantly use your willpower, and we all have very limited amounts of willpower, and so the kind of communal aspect of

that is absolutely crucial. Now I talk a lot about the sort of individual benefits and practice of fastening the book, mainly because of my diagnosis of the problem is that even churches and traditions that have this in their history, mostly people don't practice it. And so if we're going to recover it, it's going to probably start from the

bottom up. And so if lots of Christians started practicing this voluntarily, you're going to be much more likely to have you know, larger Christian communities do it together, and so that's certainly my hope. You know, a few there have been a few advents where there have been priests that have actually bought copies of the book for all

of their parishioners, which is amazing and done together. But that's my goal, is just to help to participate in a revival of fasting for everybody, but especially for Christians. And so you know, if I wasn't doing the other things I was doing, I would just sort of spend my full time making the case for this because I believe it so strongly. And it's odd though, because it's like because we wonder why is the church so weak? You know, you know, why is this law making inro

It's a perfect example. Well, I think part of it is precisely this. We abandoned the major spiritual practice that Jesus, that Jesus underwent before he started his own earthly ministry, and for some reason we think we could just drop this and it's not going to have any consequences. It does have supernatural consequences, and then also has the consequences. You point out that there's something manly and inspiring about

ascetic practices, and it's Lam. For instance, you can't streak alcohol, right, Praying five times a day, it has some of that at least if you're going to take it seriously. That's attracted.

And to me it's like, okay, well, if men in prison find that attractive and they're converting to islamra than Christianity, and they're doing it for kind of understandable reasons, we need to make sure that the Christianity we're presenting is it's some kind of weak milk toast thing, that it's very serious, more morally and just in terms of sort of life practice, which is precisely why it's actually more

conservative and orthodox. With the small Christian communions that are growing, the flaky and sort of the mainline denominations, they're all disappearing, and I think it's basically for this why bother right, it's all just it's just basically being nice to each other and nothing else. So that's not especially inspiring, especially if you're trying to turn your life around.

I mean, you talk about Christ fasting and how Pivolt it was in his ministry, and I'd read your book and then when I was going through it again, I said, I don't remember this. Why did Jesus say that certain demons can only be driven out through prayer and fasting. I feel like that's something that we should all remember immediately exactly.

What is it? It's prayer and fasting. So this, you know, if you just kind of take that literally, it's like fasting amplifies the effects of prayer. And I have no idea exactly how that works. It's bound up in the mystery of God. It is providence. But we have the Lord himself to us telling us that. And so if we have major demons were battling and we're never praying and fasting, we're just like, we're literally not using a weapon that we have at our disposal to fight the

forces of darkness. And that's obviously not a good idea.

is all the material stuff. And so it's really really easy to imagine not only that there's a material world that God has created and sustained, but that it's kind of the real world. There's maybe this other stuff, but it's sort of ethereal and not as real even if you kind of officially accept the unseen realm, whereas you know, if the biblical picture and the picture that the Christianity is taught for its entire history is that, no, it's as real in some ways more real than the material things.

It's the material things that pass away, it's the eternal things that do not. And so you again it's like we need the right kind of intellectual framework. We need to recognize reality as it actually is and then to act accordingly. And so it doesn't surprise me that, you know,

sometimes people that will stumble on too fasting and then they'll discover that it allowed them to overcome something that they had struggled with for years. We discover that accidentally, and I just thought, look, I'm just going to make I'm going to first of all, make an apologetic I'm going to make the case for why Christians should fast, make the case for what, okay, what are its original foundations,

why does it make sense? What have we lost? And then finally how to do it, because the reality is this is why most people, most Christians, at some time or another try fasting. There was a movement among evangelicals in the nineteen nineties led by doctor Bill Bright of the Campus Crusade for Christ to get Christians to fast for forty days, which is very very hardcore, and so that that does happen, but it's not sort of integrated in a way that would you know, would have the

sort of staying power that I think it needs. And people find it very hard because if you have not been fasting, if you've been eating the standard American diet, your metabolism is basically optimized not to be able to fast. You need an infusion of carbohydrates every three or four hours, or you start feeling famished and weak and hungry and panicky, which is what Americans basically all experience if they're not

doing this. And so in a previous time right where you just by necessity, had to not eat part of the time. Your metabolism was adapted to that, so it's much less hard. I'd look at this and say, okay, so what's the average America in the twenty first century, what's happening with their metabolism and what needs to happen in order to ease into fasting. So that's why I have this six week structure in the book that, by

the way, you could do during Lent. It sort of matches lent and which you're like, you're basically adapting yourself to be able to fast for longer and longer periods of time. By the time Easter comes around, you have basically done that, and then you make it a permanent part of your lifestyle. But I had to recognize that, gosh, there's a reason that even people that get enthusiastic about fasting, you might do it once or twice, don't keep it up.

And it's because their body. Again, we're embodied, right, You got to take that into account. If your body's not prepared for fasting, you're gonna have a hard time doing it. So that's why it's it ends up being kind of a both a self help book on how to do it and then a case for what we've lost in a case for why we need to reinstate this ancient practice.

night until Thursday night. Yes, And just by doing that alone, when I went back to the doctor, you know, six months later, every number was perfect. It was like, think the bad numbers. And I think that's kind of debatable, it's always changing, but it was like so intensely noticeable the difference just through instituting that, and people are coming out,

you look great. I mean, what have you done? Is just and then their their response and this is a lot of the people who were asking me are part of the Orthodox Church who already fast quite a bit. I can't do that. I could never do that. And it's such a simple change, and like you said, you do it. And then I felt so much better, not just physically I was thinking clear, it just I mean spiritually speaking, I felt like I'm every part of me

holistically speaking, was better as a result of fasting. And yet we're terrified of it and so many people. I hear people say, oh, that's bad for you to do.

way to go, and would encourage that. And so I had this kind of fat phobia that I now know was fomented by the US Department of Agriculture, which got as scared of fat in general and saturated fats in particular, and so I believed that for years. I also believe that if you didn't eat lots of small meals throughout the day, your body would store fat and would lose muscle. So if you want to keep lean masks, you want

to eat lots of small meals through the day. So my poor daughters, when they were young, I would always insist to date breakfast right when they got up, even them my younger daughter, never wanted to do it. It was only later that realized way a lot of this stuff just not true. Your body does different things depending

upon which macro nutrients you consume. And so if you have extremely low carbohydrate diet, you eat a high natural fat diet and say moderate protein, your metabolism does a different thing, even if it's the same number of calories

as when you're eating that kind of high carboy. And so that I had that whole kind of intellectual journey of getting over the fat phobia, which was huge, and then getting over the idea that it's always a good idea to eat lots of small meals, and what you're doing when you do that, you're depriving yourself of increasing

insulin sensitivity. You're never going to get into this metabolic state called ketosis, which you only really can get into if you either fast for a couple of days or you eat high fat, super low carbohydrate diet for a few days and your liver starts producing these things called ketones that your body uses for fuel. You're never going to tap into that if you're constantly eating small meals throughout the day. You're also never going to tap into

the discipline. It's just a little discipline, but if you practice this just the esthetic discipline, it spills over into other areas. But I'm going to circle back though to this one point I talked about the sort of ketones, and so my view is that God gave us two metabolic systems, sort of like we're like a hybrid or like the Toyota Prias that can run just on a battery, but it can also draw the fuel from the gas tank.

We have this kind of glucose sugar glucose carbohydrate system where our body takes carbohydrates, it breaks them down into glucose either burns it uses it for energy in our cells or stores it in our muscles in different places. Either's glycogen, and then if you have too much, body stores it as fat. Right, So there's that. That's the one that most of us use exclusively all the time. Right.

Our body produces very few keytones, so it almost never really uses a lot of the fat it consumes for energy. If you deprive yourself of carbohydrates for a few days, or you just don't eat for a couple of days, your body starts producing ketones, this different kind of fuel that your cells use, and it absolutely changes your mental state. You notice it. That was the first thing when I did this that I noticed is like, wait, my brain feels like it's really working today. That's this certainly for

me and a lot of people. That's what it does when you're in ketosis and then all of a sudden you realize, Okay, actually the church fathers knew this. They knew that fasting had both these spiritual powers and these physical effects. And I've got this quote from Saint Basil the Great. Here's how you're talking about fasting. Let me, I just want to read this. Its fasting gives birth to profits and strengthens the powerful. Fasting makes lawgivers wise.

Fasting is a safeguard for the soul, a steadfast companion for the body, a weapon for the valiant, and a gymnasium for athletics for athletes. Fasting repels temptations, anoints unto piety. It is the comrade of watchfulness and the artificer of chastity. In warrant, fights bravely in peace. It teaches stillness. Wow right, it's like it's good for your body, it's good for your mind. You're thinking, clearly, you're going to be able to resist temptation. That's what a major church father said

about fasting. So we just rediscovering this. The people that practice this knew it all along, that the spiritual it's not something that's just you know, cordoned off into a spiritual realm. Because we're body and soul. This is the thing that we do with both of our bodies and souls, and it has benefits for both.

we eat. But it seems sort of unattainable to people. And it is if I say, okay, you should fast for three days, well that's like saying to someone who's never run a mile, you should run a marathon. That's hard. That'd be bad advice. If you want to run a marathon, you need to slowly build up the number of miles you bank every week until you get there in the

same way, which we want to do. If you've never fasted, get you weaned off the metabolic effects of the standard American diet, and then slowly increase the window during the day in which you go without food, drink the window in which you're eating, and then in a few weeks you actually get there. And it really doesn't seem like that big a deal. It was something that was impossible when you started, but it's just a reasonable discipline by the time you get through the process. Yeah.

since Robert F. Kennedy Junior became the HHS secretary. There are modifications made to the USDA food guidelines every five years, and it's a complicated, long term process to really fully reform them. But what happened here just a few weeks ago in which they visually actually flipped the pyramid, which

is great, So it's an upside down pyramid. Just remind people that maybe never saw the food pyramid was this piece of advice from the USDA that basically said, eat fats very very sparingly, animal fats even more sparingly, and then down at the bottom you get breads and pastas and all these carbohydrates, right, So in other words, most

of your diet should be carbohydrates. I'm absolutely certain that that increased the rate of type two diabetes, pre diabetes, and obesity in this country because it encouraged people to do the very thing that makes them insulin resistant and makes their bodies less able to use excess calories and fat for storage and for energy and instead stores it. And so you've got a massive spike in type two diabetes, pre diabetes, and obesity that corresponds to this dumb dietary advice.

And we've known for a good while now that this was really a really bad idea. Nina Taischoltz throught a terrific book called The Big Fat Surprise, in which she tells the whole story of the shoddy science that led us to conclude that fat was the enemy and carbs were just totally our friends. And that influence USDA, and they're also, needless to say, certain corporate interests that liked

it this way. On the material line, the cereal lobby looks like it turns out as much stronger than the beef lobby, apparently in DC, and so Kennedy and then the team that was responsible for the revisions realize this. They knew this. They also knew, okay, we can't push this too far at once, and so they kind of kept the cap on saturated fat, which I think they need to get rid of. But I understand why you didn't want to do it all at once. But it

now emphasizes the importance of proteins. It emphasizes that natural fats are fine, that eating a lot of carbs all the time, especially refined and ultra processed carbs, is a bad idea. Sugar added sugar is a bad idea. And so even if you don't do everything right, if you just drop added sugar and you drop industrially refined carbohydrates from your diet, so when you get carbs it's from sort of whole natural sources, and then quit being scared of fats and make sure you get enough protein. Just

that alone will improve people's health. And then I think I'm just hoping that we continue to go in that direction. But I mean, honestly, as you said, I'm in greeceting about the USD, the food pyramid, the guidelines, you know, but we didn't know at the time how radically things had changed. So quickly, and so to me, I mean, it's just terrific. It's not everything, but we're moving the

right direction. It's nice to have the government officials that actually read this stuff and understand it, because this seemed like it was just almost unreformable, and yet all of a sudden we've got this flipped inverted pyramid. And then we even have Marty McCarry, who's the director of the FDA, when he's talking actually talking about the bad and shoddy science, financial keys and others that led to the original guideline.

So talk about from a messaging standpoint, it's one hundred and eighty degrees and so we're much much much better shape. Because remember when I wrote the fast Feast, when it first came out, it was like directly in the face of official government advised, which is why I say I came not a physician. Now it's I think it's such much more compatible with what the official federal government is recommending.

to my wife about fasting, and I kind of feel like fasting is similar to humility. As soon as you start talking about how well you're doing at it, you lose it totally. And so in practice, I hate talking about fasting if we're talking about the actual spiritual benefits of it exactly. You know, Hey, Jay, we're in a fasting season. That's quite a burkley that you got over there.

supposed to be done. And by the way, you shouldn't even probably feel like that if you're really doing it correctly. But in any case, you don't want to brag about it. So I treat my what I'm doing with my own fasting is one thing, and my sort of advocacy about it is another thing. And that's what I'm doing here. So I'm not going to tell you if I'm in the middle of a fast or not well.

than to show them, Hey, look at our calendar. We fast on Wednesdays and Fridays and probably half the year some form of vegan fast. And it's her way of kind of evangelizing for the benefits of fast.

you don't. You don't want to sort of forget that. The goal I think with the kind of eat fast, feast lifestyle ultimately is that you get the physical and the spiritual benefits of food, but you also gain control over food that it doesn't control you because you have a detachment from it. You can actually go one or two days without eating with that being miserable. Imagine that.

It's like, Okay, it's like, let's say you're allergic to certain things, right, I have a problem with certain foods, right, And so imagine how much easier it is if you're always able to skip a meal if you need to because maybe they're going to serve the thing you're allergic to. You're much better off. What does it mean? It means you actually have discipline and control over your relationship with food.

That's I think the ideal, not that you be obsessed with it forever, and you know, focusing on the macro nutrients, there's a training to get used to it, but then in fact you end up spending less time thinking about it, and you really should. That's what should happen long term, is that you're not constantly chattering and sort of talking

about it and obsessing about it. But I do think because it's such a new practice for a lot of people and so hard because of the way we eat, that you do need to have lots of you know,

sort of conversation about it. But you know, I'm thinking about just in my colleagues. I have a colleague, Roger Severino, and he and a family or Eastern Rite Catholic, and so they have you know, it's been very similar in the fasting schedule to Eastern Orthodox, you know. But he could totally do it, and he actually looks like somebody that knows how to do that, you know, and so

it's really not surprising to me. But I can remember thinking, Aye, he's Eastern, right, so those guys are they're eating like a vegan diet a lot of the time, you know,

so you know, he's getting all these benefits. But you know, to me, it's like, honestly, I think this is in some ways might be the mission of the Eastern Church to the rest of the Christian world is to evangelize for this that's where the practice has retained most of it, right, Like, you know, it's not I mean early Christians, from what I could tell, actually fasted all day on Wednesday and Friday, so the day the word trade, right and then crucified.

That's not really around when you get the inver Day's feast. There's a lot of things like that, but it's still a much more rigorous thing. And it's so obviously a part of the practice that just talking about, you know, Orthodox Christians would talk about the benefits physically and spiritually to fasting. It may be that, and look, it's actually can be a part of the calendar, so it won't just be a one time thing the church does on

New Year's Day and then gives up. It's something that's a part of the Christian life, and it supplies a kind of an external control to you, right, So it's not constantly about you're deciding to do it. It's like, oh no, this is the beginning of the you know, a fasting season, and so we're all doing it together.

It's held in somebody's The strength of the Orthodox Christians is to send of retain the ancient things, the ancient creed saint your practices, and to think of that not as a private thing to be hoarded and benefited but to tell the rest of the Christian world about it.

a blessing. Advent and Lent, in any of the fasting seasons, they're kind of forgotten gifts from most of the Christian community. And I mean, we're coming up on Lent. We just finished the Advent season, and I'm actually I look forward at the beginning. When I first started fasting, I was very litigious about everything. Oh I'd look at it every every uh nutrition label and say, oh, this has you know, dried milk, can't.

that we're depriving ourselves of. Paul kings North to This has this line that a feast without a fast is a strange, half finished thing. Hmm, And I love that because we don't we haven't forgotten how to feast, Yeah, but we've forgotten the prelude, the preparatory aspect of it.

you're cheating yourself? It doesn't really make sense what they mean, but they do recognize that it's unnatural always to be sort of depriving yourself of a good food is a good right. We have sacrament that are involved with our food. And so if you actually sort of look at the way, certainly Jesus and the apostles practiced it. Read the Old Testament. Right before the Church is actually established, there was a

recognition of this, of the benefits of a feast. Got Christ's first miracle in the Book of John is the wedding feast to Cana, right that it's not a cheat to eat a lot once in a while, it's part of the whole package. So sometimes when you really ought to rejoice in God's blessings and you know, participate in those blessings and enjoy them, that's what a feast is, and so you're celebrating it. Of course, it's at least in the Christian calendar. It's always a celebration of something

God has done. And one of the ways you do that is by eating and feasting in ways that you would not normally do. So, like I just think it's generally a bad idea to consume added sugar. We just know that it just is not helpful in any obvious way for us to do that on a regular basis. It doesn't follow that you don't have feasts where you enjoy those things, right, But that's what it is. And so I always encourage people don't think of a feast as a cheat day or it's like, Okay, that's what's

keeping me on track because they get to indulge or something. No, it's a part of the overall pattern that God wants for us, and don't just don't just don't think of it that way. And moreover, I would argue, you don't really know what a feast is supposed is supposed to be like how it's supposed to be experienced. If you never fast, Yes, you just every three hours you're getting a frappuccino and sixty eight whet thens, right, and half

the thing of peanut butter. You never allow yourself to get hungry because you want to lose muscle, and you want to sleep well whatever. Right, and then oh goodie, it's Easter Sunday, right, and you just go crazy. That's just a different thing. You basically just ate more than you normally do, which is already too much. If you have preceded that feast day by a real a real fast and real abstinence, that's just experientially gonna be something

completely different. I had so many people say I never really knew what Easter feast was like. Yes, I had really during Holy Week, I had really you know, kind of deprived myself in a sense, but fast. That's why the Church, in her wisdom, it always has those feasts always are preceded by some kind of fast. We've kept the feasts and dropped the fast and then wonder why we're having problems.

the church calendar, which is given to you. You don't decide what the church calendar is, right, it's there, it's external. You're going to be much less likely to be gluttonous. You can be much less likely to have those those weaknesses because it's a type of discipline that it carries over into so many other things. It shouldn't surprise anyone. Just we're all aware of the fact that different foods make our minds and brains feel differently and our bodies

feel differently. And it's exactly exactly the same thing with fasting.

just like prayer is a skill. Right, it's a practice. We're creatures of habit and so things that initially require as individual acts of will to get us to do it, let's say, go to the gym or something. Then eventually it becomes habituated, so we kind of do it automatically, and then it eventually just kind of becomes a part of who you are, and you just like it, and that's just the thing that you do. Fasting is the same way. It starts out with little acts of the will,

but it shouldn't. It's not three days without eating right off the bat. That's just a formula for failure. You know, as I say in the book, that fasting is meant it's meant to be a sacrifice, it's not meant to be torture. So start off slowly. I would encourage kind of eating ketogenically for a few days, which just means lots of fasts, very few carbs, and a moderate protein that already moves your metabolism in the right direction. And

then slowly expand that eating windows. So maybe you go sixteen hours in a twenty four hour day without eating, so you just eat out all your meals within an eight hour time window. This is the intermittent fasting. Do that for a week, and then you can narrow it to four hours, right, which sounds hard, but it's actually not. You can get all the calories you need to four hour period and then your body is not in the

eating state for twenty hours out of the day. And what you're doing is you're actually increasing your insolent sensitivity. You're kind of helping your body train in converting either dietary or bodily fat fuels, and you're habituating yourself to going longer periods without eating. If you do that slowly, think of it as kind of an on ramp for a few weeks, and you'd otherwise kind of physically healthy.

You'll be in a position where you really could fast for three days without it feeling like torture and just be a discipline. And it would have been very to most people do fast for three days right at the beginning. You just they have to be locked up in a cage and ped water, you know, because those people are just not going to do that right off the bat. Yeah.

Now that correlates with men who are in religious traditions because they have communities, but it's also true even for non religious if they have genuine, rich communities, they're much more likely to to you know, it should be well off,

at least in a kind of physical sense. And so that's actually I think both of those are important just because at the moment I say that because ironically, our technology kind of leads us into a disembodied state, and then it also provides a fake substitute for our sociality because we can connect. We're connected on Facebook. If you're a guy and you're into gaming, you may really genuinely be working with other people that you're playing the games with,

which you know, in moderation I think is fine. But we're getting pushed away from our embodiedness, and we're getting pushed away from the genuine sources of community that we absolutely need to florish as human beings.

or look away from reality?

think about it. If you're not, and you're just confessing together, you know, and just in your prayers, I can say it's a Catholic I go to confession. I like to go to different priests, actually, because if I keep going to the same one, I know I'm going to hear you keep listing the same things, right, And so who knows though if I just do as a random sample. But that's the reality, is that we get stuck in

rots and we're not supposed to be that way. I mean, remember, you know, we're supposed to be purging ourselves of sin in this life, right, We're supposed to be detaching ourselves from these things that are impediments to us. And so why don't we do that? We don't do it because it's uncomfortable, and because we're falling and we're still attached to things, and so actually deciding. You know, there's a

book do hard stuff. There is a great book about sort of ice baths and things called It's like something like that what doesn't kill us? Right, it's an illusion to Nietzsche's that which doesn't kill us is stronger, which

is kind of half truth. But there's something to that that like just choosing every day to do a hard thing that makes us uncomfortable, or in my case, start the day with a boring thing, right, like the thing you find totally boring, that's not that time sensitive, but you still need to do, like do receipts for reimbursements, forcing yourself to do that. Right. For me, that literally is a mortification to have to do something that I just find this it's so boring. I can't believe they're

having to do this. But that's actually that's tough for me and for other people. It's something else.

fruitful and multiply so that happens. I'll give you a perfect example. So we are so far into unreality that our culture and its commanding heights are medical societies. Literally, it's still maintaining that there's not an intrinsic difference between males and females, right that what you really are is your gender identity, and that's purely a psychological state, and it's not related to your body, and maybe your gender

identity is completely contrary to your actual body. Right now, The benefit of that lie is that it's so blatant and so obvious that even people that aren't paying attention to realize, well, wait, wait, so we're going to sterilize kids because they're stressed to their bodies and we're going to boys and girls' sports. This is crazy, right, So our culture is in the process of waking up from that.

But it's just one example of kind of a denial of reality, in this case the intrinsic complementary nature of the difference between male and female. And so I really do think that the farther you get away from reality and your own thinking and your kind of cultural beliefs, you cease to exist in the realm of reality. You sterilize your children, you quit having children of your own.

And where do you think that's going to lead? Run that out forty or fifty years and then just you apply a little natural selection to the culture, we're going to get replaced by a culture that doesn't believe at least those things. And it may be way worse in every other in every other way, but at least it's not that stupid, right, And so I think that's honestly, how at least Americans we should think about our situation.

Either we fix this and we repent as a culture, or we get replaced by a culture and a religious ideology that we would really really not want to inflict

upon our grandchildren.

and agree upon. These are basic realities. And so if we if we deny those things, you have a culture that denies the intrinsic dignity of the human person, or denies the nature of mammalian biology, right, or you know, denies the metaphysical truth that the matter is not all that matters. That's long term for a culture, that's that's how you destroy yourself. So all we need all of

those things.

God is much more likely to be breaking through. And I think that's probably one is the experience of a new child that's suddenly in your life that you accommodate. That's the one that sort of jumps out to me. And then I think for a lot of people the experience of nature in particular moments. The danger is always, of course, that you worship and serve the creature rather than the creator. But I do think that it breaks in because in some ways these days, people need a

sense that there is a grander reality than themselves. And then also the second sense is that, okay, but I don't want to attach ultimate significance to a reality that's not ultimately significant. And so I actually think we're in better shape now than we were, you know, fifteen years ago when new atheism was at its height. I mean,

atheism is so dead. I don't know how it could be deader, right, And I can remember because I was in the debates not that long ago, thinking okay, boy, this is going to be unpleasant. But it had absolutely no staying power. It didn't capture people's got moral sensibilities, or their metaphysical sensibilities, or their understanding themselves. So I have friends that were new atheists now say gosh, yeah,

that was that was a mistake. So in some ways, I think this sort of chaos and fracturing that we're seeing in the culture at the moment, especially between the generations, it's at least an opportunity for those of us that are believers to make the case for the sort of wider aspects of reality that people are missing.

biological realities. He's closer to grace for having done that than he was before because he's starting to see that, Okay, his life trying to destroy people's belief in God had these unintended consequences that he had not appreciated enough before.