The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Why Your Marriage Feels Like A Prison Instead Of An Adventure

00:00:00.880 Who answers America's call for more energy?

00:00:04.660 Our people do.

00:00:06.340 Chevron's U.S. energy production has increased by nearly 60% in the past three years.

00:00:11.800 Hi, my name is Aaron, and I'm a WealthSight representative at Chevron.

00:00:15.240 I'm proud of the work that I do every day.

00:00:17.500 It gets more American oil out of the ground, and it brings America more energy security.

00:00:22.120 Learn more about what our people do at chevron.com slash America.

00:00:30.000 There are a few things I love more than Good Ranchers, but there are not many. I'll tell you

00:00:35.120 that. I think it might make it in the top five of all things in the world. It's just the best

00:00:41.680 quality meat at the very best price from the very best people. Meanwhile, you go to the grocery

00:00:47.520 store. You ever ask yourself, hey, where was this meat raised? Because American beef on the package

00:00:52.060 does not necessarily mean everything that that company sells is American. Good Ranchers makes

00:00:56.420 it very simple. Every cut they sell is labeled, born, raised, and harvested in the USA. They

00:01:03.620 partner with more than 100 local American farms and ranchers to deliver 100% American meat straight

00:01:08.000 to your door. Beef, chicken, pork, even seafood. You know what you are feeding your family. You

00:01:13.060 know where it came from. You're supporting American farmers and ranchers producing it.

00:01:17.100 And I love supporting Americans, and I love a good price. For me, though, it all comes down

00:01:22.280 to the quality. The Good Ranchers quality is just next level on certainly all the beef. Even I'm not

00:01:28.600 a huge chicken guy. The chicken is like the best chicken you're going to get. Whether we're talking

00:01:32.360 about the chicken breasts, whether we're talking about the seed oil-free chicken nuggets, it's all

00:01:35.400 just magnificent. The people are great too. Start a plan at goodranchers.com slash wire. Get 50 bucks

00:01:40.580 off plus free meat with every order. You can build your own box starting as low as under 29 bucks.

00:01:46.080 That's goodranchers.com slash wire. 50 bucks off plus free meat with every order. Goodranchers.com

00:01:50.520 slash wire. Goodranchers.com American meat delivered. Visit BetMGM Casino and check out

00:01:58.840 the newest exclusive, the Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play

00:02:04.280 responsibly. 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions

00:02:09.480 or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2600

00:02:16.520 to speak to an advisor free of charge bet mgm operates pursuant to an operating agreement with

00:02:21.820 igaming ontario so i actually did a fair bit of the work that i'm going to talk about tonight

00:02:28.840 when i lived in boston that was between 1992 and 1998 when i had the privilege

00:02:38.980 of teaching at Harvard,

00:02:42.720 and I worked on my first book.

00:02:45.240 I finished my first book there.

00:02:46.960 In fact, I think I really did

00:02:48.400 the majority of the work.

00:02:52.460 I did some at McGill

00:02:53.900 when I was there in Montreal beforehand,

00:02:56.120 but I did a lot of the work

00:02:57.260 that culminated in this book,

00:02:59.260 Maps of Meaning,

00:03:00.840 very academic book.

00:03:02.940 One that was probably really,

00:03:05.900 in some ways,

00:03:06.640 mostly written for me.

00:03:07.920 this is not exactly the right way to write a book because obviously when you're writing a book

00:03:12.580 you're trying to sort through ideas but also to communicate them and I put a lot more emphasis

00:03:19.920 in that book on sorting through the ideas than on communicating them you know and that made it

00:03:26.020 that's not a criticism precisely although it is an indication of a certain kind of limitation

00:03:32.420 It took me 20 years of lecturing about that book, really, before I could make the ideas that I had been wrestling with communicable to, well, communicable, that's the simplest way of thinking about it, a lot of lecturing and then a lot of writing.

00:03:54.080 and that resulted in two books that were quite popular,

00:04:01.040 12 Rules for Life and An Antidote to Chaos,

00:04:06.400 and then Beyond Order, 12 More Rules for Life.

00:04:10.440 And now I have a fourth book, which I sent off to the publisher

00:04:14.440 in its more or less finished form two weeks ago,

00:04:18.220 which is We Who Wrestle with God.

00:04:20.060 and all of these books are attempts to address

00:04:25.300 what I think of as the fundamental issue of our time.

00:04:31.240 Both Tammy and Jonathan made allusions to that

00:04:34.860 because the fundamental issue is one of identity

00:04:38.720 and there isn't a more fundamental issue than that.

00:04:42.900 So one of the things I realized when I was writing Maps of Meaning

00:04:46.680 was that there are two fundamental forms of knowledge

00:04:54.560 that we need to have about the world,

00:04:57.300 about life.

00:05:00.560 That's a more accurate way of putting it.

00:05:03.480 We need to know what is in the world,

00:05:07.680 and in some ways that's the domain of scientific inquiry,

00:05:12.640 but that isn't all we need to know.

00:05:15.120 And it might not even be the most fundamental thing we know.

00:05:18.800 We need to know how to be in the world.

00:05:21.640 We need to know how to act in the world.

00:05:23.700 We need to know what to attend to in the world.

00:05:26.920 And we need to know how to prioritize our action and our attention in the world.

00:05:31.740 And that's not the same as knowing what the world's made of.

00:05:36.620 And there was a famous philosopher, David Hume, who pointed this out several centuries ago.

00:05:42.560 He said that there's no simple way of moving from a description of the world to action in the world.

00:05:50.460 There's no easy way of deriving a sense of what should be in the world from what is in the world.

00:05:57.820 That's the gap between what is and what ought to be.

00:06:00.840 And we live our life in relationship to what ought to be.

00:06:04.760 Jonathan made an allusion to that too when he talked about what it meant to be an American.

00:06:08.580 It could be that being an American is a simple consequence of something that could be stated

00:06:15.860 as a fact, which is that you're born in the United States, which is a description of you

00:06:21.660 in some ways that's you as an object, you as a thing, you as a set of facts.

00:06:27.660 But then he put a twist on that and said, well, maybe being an American is actually

00:06:32.560 something that's aspirational, that's predicated on a pursuit, and that fits more in with the idea

00:06:39.500 of the American dream, right? Being an American is something that you participate in, so it's an

00:06:44.660 identity. It's something perhaps that you are, but that you also become. And you know that to some

00:06:50.640 degree, because of course you understand that there are greater and lesser Americans, and what

00:06:58.780 that implies is that there are better and worse ways of being American, and that implies in turn

00:07:04.620 that it's not merely a matter of a description of a set of facts, but something like an aspiration,

00:07:10.660 an aim, you might say, an aim that might be signified by the flag that you look up at,

00:07:16.620 right, and that flutters against the sky as an object of aspiration that you pledge allegiance

00:07:23.280 to, which means that it's not only something that you aspire to, but it's something that

00:07:29.380 you all collectively aspire to, and so then it's not only an aim, but it's a collective

00:07:36.960 aim, and it's not only an identity in that you're an American in your aspiration, but

00:07:41.220 it's a collective identity, because you're all American in your aspiration, and what

00:07:46.760 that implies is that something approximating an aspiration or an aim unites you. And that implies

00:07:56.020 in turn that something like a structure of value unites you, right? Because you aim at something

00:08:04.300 of highest value. And when you pledge allegiance to the flag, you swear to embody, to act out

00:08:13.380 the ideals that sit at the base of your culture

00:08:16.880 and to be the standard bearer for those ideals,

00:08:20.600 but not only conceptually,

00:08:22.460 but in the manner that you comport yourself

00:08:24.960 in the way that you're an ideal

00:08:27.000 and in the way that you pursue an ideal.

00:08:30.060 And so all of that consideration

00:08:33.420 can help you understand that

00:08:35.060 you need to know how to be in the world.

00:08:39.360 You don't just need to know what the world's made of.

00:08:42.360 you can't follow the science

00:08:44.720 let's say

00:08:45.920 because science is a descriptive enterprise

00:08:48.780 and your existence

00:08:51.040 is not a descriptive enterprise

00:08:52.660 it's something that you have to

00:08:54.240 cobble together on the fly

00:08:56.900 it's something that you have to commit to

00:08:58.740 it's something that's beyond you

00:09:01.020 that you have to aim at

00:09:02.380 and that's an interesting thing too

00:09:04.480 because we always aim at

00:09:07.160 what's beyond us

00:09:08.080 because if you have what

00:09:09.880 you want at hand, there's no aim, right? There's nothing to do. It's already there.

00:09:15.480 And so every aim is aspirational, and that means every identity is aspirational, that you're

00:09:24.780 searching for what's beyond you as you formulate your aim. I think that's a very interesting

00:09:30.320 observation from the religious perspective, because you could define God as the good that's

00:09:36.840 always beyond you. That's not an exhaustive definition of God. There's no such thing as an

00:09:44.360 exhaustive definition of God. You have partial definitions, but that's a good initial starting

00:09:52.520 place for us tonight when we're trying to delve into what it is that you need to know. You need

00:10:00.140 to know what is, and you need to know what should be. You need to know how the world is constituted

00:10:06.380 at an objective level, but you also have to understand how to act in the world. You have an

00:10:11.600 existential problem at hand. You need a way of being. That's an identity, and you don't just need

00:10:17.920 a way of being. You need a way of being that is collective, because it can't just be your identity,

00:10:24.460 and the reason it can't be your identity is for the same reason that there isn't just one of you

00:10:28.680 in the audience in the theater, is that for better or worse, you're stuck with, and you have the

00:10:35.500 opportunity of other people. And that obviously necessitates something approximating negotiation

00:10:44.060 in relationship to your identity. And it also indicates that a collective identity is necessary

00:10:51.400 so that people can be unified in their aim. Well, why? Well, if you're unified in your aim,

00:10:58.460 you can cooperate. If you're unified in your aim, you don't have to fight. Those are both

00:11:04.180 very useful things. How do we unify our aim? How do we bring the multiplicity that defines us

00:11:12.100 into the unity that makes us an individual? And then how do we make the individuals that we all

00:11:17.660 are into the collective that constitutes a functional society? That's the question on the

00:11:24.080 identity side. That's the question on the value side. That's the question on the aim side or the

00:11:29.240 aspirational side, one of the things that I learned, maybe, think this is right, and it was

00:11:39.360 something I hypothesized in Maps of Meaning, the book I made reference to, and it's been a predicate

00:11:45.480 of my work ever since, certainly a predicate of this new book, We Who Wrestle With God, is that

00:11:51.460 a story is a description of our identity.

00:11:58.380 So now this is a good thing to know.

00:12:01.180 We seem to have two ways of conceptualizing our knowledge

00:12:04.260 or representing our knowledge or of knowing

00:12:07.420 the one formalized by the scientific endeavor.

00:12:11.560 Again, that gives us access to a robust description

00:12:15.860 of the facts that make up the world.

00:12:18.800 but the other that informs our mode of being,

00:12:24.820 our patterns of attention and action.

00:12:26.860 Well, why patterns of attention and action?

00:12:31.940 When you go watch a movie, which is a story,

00:12:35.000 when you read a work of fiction,

00:12:37.540 you're trying to determine what the character

00:12:42.220 who's the protagonist of the tale is up to.

00:12:45.660 right and the author puts the character in a variety of different situations and you see

00:12:53.220 what they aim at and you come to understand the world they inhabit by inferring their aim

00:12:58.820 and you come to feel the emotions of the character as a consequence of understanding that aim which

00:13:05.560 is how you understand other people as well you start to understand someone who isn't you or even

00:13:11.680 that is you by starting to understand what that person is aiming at,

00:13:16.920 what that person's up to,

00:13:19.000 what it is that they're attending to,

00:13:22.220 what they focus on,

00:13:24.660 what they devote their resources to,

00:13:27.600 and what they act in relationship to.

00:13:29.640 That's something like their hierarchy of value.

00:13:33.640 And you're interested in that

00:13:36.540 because investigating the patterns of attention and action

00:13:44.820 that characterize other people

00:13:46.260 and evaluating the consequences of those patterns of attention and action,

00:13:50.420 that informs you.

00:13:52.800 If someone that you know has a particularly dismal life,

00:13:57.980 then you can observe that and embody it and understand it,

00:14:02.100 And with any luck, you can derive from that example a counterexample.

00:14:08.900 You might not, by viewing someone's suffering, especially if the suffering is unnecessary,

00:14:14.000 you might be able to understand how you could avoid such suffering yourself.

00:14:19.840 Hence the utility of the pattern of failure that might be typified in fictional form,

00:14:27.600 in movies and in drama and on stage and in novels.

00:14:34.080 Likewise, you want to see the pattern that moves you upward,

00:14:38.500 that transforms you upward.

00:14:40.160 That's the protagonist in a story who's a hero.

00:14:44.640 A hero is someone who's moving upward

00:14:47.040 and making the transformations necessary to continue that journey upward.

00:14:50.840 And you want to observe that pattern and you want to embody it

00:14:56.240 Because in principle, then you can, your life can unfold in a manner that spirals you upward in an unending cycle.

00:15:04.800 And that's how you address the problem of how to be in the world.

00:15:10.440 There's a fundamental thing to understand, as far as I'm concerned, that a story is a description of identity and aim.

00:15:18.340 It explains why it is that stories are so important to us.

00:15:21.760 If you understand that the two problems you face

00:15:24.340 as a being that has to know in order to live

00:15:27.120 is the nature of the landscape

00:15:29.020 and how to conduct yourself in that landscape,

00:15:31.880 then you can understand why you need science

00:15:33.900 as the foremost example of the description of things

00:15:37.380 and why you need story,

00:15:39.420 because the story tells you how to live.

00:15:43.020 The story is a description of the consequences

00:15:45.260 of a pattern of life.

00:15:47.000 And so we're fascinated by stories because we need to inform ourselves in relationship to our utmost aim and I suppose as well our most possibly cataclysmic end.

00:16:09.960 that's in some ways

00:16:11.940 you could think about that as the landscape of heaven and hell

00:16:14.840 if heaven is the best

00:16:16.520 is the place that you occupy

00:16:18.960 if your mode of being is as close to perfect

00:16:21.080 as it could be

00:16:21.940 and hell would be the mode of being that characterizes

00:16:25.160 you if everything is

00:16:26.160 gone to hell

00:16:27.560 and so those are the poles of existence 0.74

00:16:31.020 the poles of narrative existence

00:16:33.060 the ultimate reaches

00:16:34.900 of the story

00:16:36.580 what's it called?

00:16:37.920 Peterson Academy

00:16:39.480 Peterson Academy

00:16:40.360 Peterson Academy

00:16:41.220 It's called Peterson Academy

00:16:42.500 Peterson Academy

00:16:43.480 If you want an actual education

00:16:45.600 With hand-selected professors

00:16:47.320 from top universities

00:16:48.640 around the world

00:16:49.940 Bringing the best professors together

00:16:52.180 making sure they're not censored

00:16:53.420 in any way

00:16:54.000 giving them the audience

00:16:54.960 and the remuneration

00:16:55.660 and appreciation they deserve

00:16:56.780 And you were true to your word

00:16:57.740 You gave me absolute

00:16:58.760 intellectual autonomy

00:16:59.880 I have had it through every course

00:17:01.440 We figure we can offer people

00:17:03.040 a high-quality

00:17:04.060 university-level education

00:17:05.700 for under $2,000

00:17:07.100 Well, congratulations, Jordan. It's honestly brilliant.

00:17:09.340 I can't wait to enroll myself. I'll be doing that straight after this.

00:17:13.260 Fun, Joe.

00:17:18.300 So why am I interested in religious topics, let's say?

00:17:23.260 We who wrestle with God in my books, in Maps of Meaning, in 12 Rules for Life,

00:17:29.740 Beyond Order, and in the current book, I spend a lot of time assessing stories and also telling

00:17:36.140 them and trying to understand what they signify. And as I've done that over the years,

00:17:44.220 the stories that I've included have more and more often been religious or sacred stories

00:17:50.900 derived from a variety of different cultures, but most particularly focusing on the sacred

00:17:56.760 stories of the Judeo-Christian culture. Sacred stories, this is a definition, sacred stories

00:18:03.960 are the deepest stories. This is a definition. Now, we know that stories vary in depth. Everyone

00:18:10.840 understands this, because you know that if you're looking for a night's entertainment, and you turn

00:18:17.040 on your smart TV, and you search out a movie, and you're exhausted, you might want a shallow story,

00:18:23.920 right, that doesn't require a lot of thought or a lot of emotional commitment. It might teach you

00:18:28.380 something, it might merely affirm what you already know, and so it's simple and easy in that manner.

00:18:34.780 But you don't fool yourself or anyone else into thinking that you're doing something

00:18:39.220 profound or life-changing. But you also know that there are stories that people have told you or

00:18:45.840 that you've read, especially if they hit you in particularly problematic periods of your life,

00:18:52.380 that have transformed you deeply and that hit you profoundly.

00:18:57.740 And you know that there are authors who are reliably better at that than other authors.

00:19:02.940 And those are the authors we regard as great and we regard them as deep

00:19:06.700 because they move us, whatever that means, they move us at a level that's deep.

00:19:12.420 And we can feel that emotionally.

00:19:14.760 And there'd be no hierarchy of value in the world of literature or art, for that matter,

00:19:20.140 if there wasn't, if we didn't have something like an intuition of depth, and some stories are deeper

00:19:26.420 than others, and the deepest stories are sacred stories. And I'm not trying to convince you of

00:19:32.440 that. I'm offering that as a definition of what constitutes the sacred. The deeper a story is,

00:19:38.040 the more it verges on the religious. And we tend to think in our culture, because we're so obsessed

00:19:47.840 with what is, we're so obsessed with the scientific description, that we think that

00:19:53.660 the religious claim is something akin to the scientific claim, that it's a description of

00:19:59.800 what is. But it is that in a sense, in that you can't figure out how to be without also knowing

00:20:09.500 what is, but the fundamental aim of the religious enterprise is existential. It's the attempt

00:20:17.980 to provide you and the culture that you exist in with an integrating identity. All right,

00:20:29.560 so let me give you an example of that. So I'll tell you a little bit to begin with

00:20:37.860 about the story of Abraham, and Abraham is a story of character and identity development

00:20:45.200 and sacrifice, both of those together. Those things always occur together. You could say

00:20:53.400 in some ways that they're the same thing. Now, Tammy made an allusion to this when she

00:20:58.180 talked about marriage. Naive young people often regard marriage only as a sacrifice 0.63

00:21:06.380 and often as a negative sacrifice.

00:21:09.760 You pick one partner and that means that you forego all other partners

00:21:13.540 and that's obviously a sacrifice.

00:21:15.440 And once you're married and committed to one person,

00:21:18.500 you can't do just what you want all the time.

00:21:22.780 Now, whether that's a sacrifice of something real or something illusory

00:21:27.440 is a very complicated question

00:21:29.760 because young people in our culture in particular

00:21:32.680 tend to think that they're free and individual actors

00:21:36.200 and then they're locked into something like a power relationship,

00:21:39.940 a constraining power relationship,

00:21:41.400 if they take on any long-term responsibility like marriage.

00:21:46.440 But the truth of the matter is that young people are not autonomous individuals.

00:21:52.680 They're barely not children. 0.66

00:21:55.940 And that can be true even if they're 40 or 50.

00:22:01.280 And that freedom isn't freedom.

00:22:07.340 It's grip.

00:22:08.780 It's the unconscious grip of whims that demand immediate gratification.

00:22:15.500 Because when people say that they're afraid, let's say, to be married

00:22:19.420 because they won't be able to do what they want,

00:22:22.220 what they actually mean, even they don't know it,

00:22:24.760 is that they won't be able to pursue the hedonic gratification

00:22:28.840 that all the immediate whims that possess them would demand that they do.

00:22:34.180 And that's nothing but immaturity,

00:22:36.880 and giving that up actually isn't a sacrifice,

00:22:39.300 not in any fundamental sense, it's actually progression.

00:22:42.940 Because we know that when your character develops

00:22:47.440 from childhood to adulthood, and you mature,

00:22:51.380 that the advantage of maturation is that you learn to act in a way

00:22:55.540 that stabilizes you now and gives you hope

00:22:59.180 and stabilizes your future and gives that hope

00:23:02.540 and makes you useful to your future self

00:23:05.340 and to people around you,

00:23:07.300 and that that only happens if you give up

00:23:10.140 this narrow self-centeredness

00:23:12.240 that characterizes someone radically immature.

00:23:15.100 And there's nothing in that that's a bad deal

00:23:18.060 except on the occasions where, in principle, 1.00

00:23:23.100 your idiot whim could have found gratification. 0.99

00:23:25.240 But anyone with any sense by the time they're certainly in their mid-20s realizes that you tend to gratify your immediate whims at substantial cost to the medium term in the future and to yourself in the medium term in the future, but also to the people around you. 0.99

00:23:45.740 I mean, that's the objection to hedonistic immaturity is that's not going to work out for you in the long run and it's very hard on the people around you.

00:23:52.980 They can't rely on you, but you can't rely on you either, and that's not a good thing.

00:23:57.480 And so that sacrifice in relationship to character, the sacrifice that necessarily

00:24:05.660 occurs in relationship to characterological development is the giving up of something

00:24:11.260 insufficient and inadequate in favor of something more functional of a higher order,

00:24:21.020 of a more profound foundation of a higher aim.

00:24:27.260 It's a manner of incorporating the future into the present

00:24:30.420 and it's a way of integrating the way that you are

00:24:33.980 from moment to moment with what you need in the future

00:24:36.620 but also what everyone else around you needs now and in the future.

00:24:41.040 And so it's not so much a sacrifice of your creative hedonistic individuality

00:24:48.620 as it is an integration of the multiplicity that characterizes you

00:24:55.660 into a structure that takes much more into account,

00:24:59.840 communally and temporally,

00:25:02.260 and that works much better for you,

00:25:05.080 all things considered, as well as for everyone else.

00:25:08.060 Okay, so this is what happens to Abraham.

00:25:11.860 So we meet Abraham when he's in his 70s.

00:25:16.000 Now, the story has it that the patriarchal types of the Old Testament lived longer than modern people live,

00:25:25.220 and that's a consequence of their raising, you might say, into the status of sort of quasi-God-like heroes.

00:25:34.160 But Abraham is 70 when we first encounter him,

00:25:38.480 and we don't know really anything about him when he emerges on the scene.

00:25:42.460 and this is quite typical of the heroes of biblical stories.

00:25:47.300 The story opens in the middle of their life

00:25:49.780 when their great adventure is about to occur,

00:25:53.080 and we don't have a lot of background about the people.

00:25:57.580 And I suppose this is partly because the great adventures of our life

00:26:01.000 that define us do come about when we're pursuing our nondescript pursuits.

00:26:07.840 and the heroes in the Old Testament stories

00:26:11.340 are every man in a sense

00:26:14.320 and that's a good thing

00:26:15.280 because if it wasn't the case

00:26:16.660 then the stories couldn't be used as models

00:26:19.260 and the biblical stories are sophisticated

00:26:23.980 in a manner that exceeds even that too

00:26:26.280 because Abraham for example

00:26:28.880 and Jacob who we mentioned

00:26:30.180 Jacob has the vision of Jacob's ladder

00:26:32.560 spiraling up to heaven

00:26:33.840 right that's the vision of

00:26:35.880 endless character development upward. They are not good people when they start their adventures,

00:26:42.460 their characterological transformation. When their story initiates and then develops,

00:26:48.300 they move from being sinful and inadequate in very profound ways into being characters who

00:26:56.640 are heroic, who are models, and who transform so radically that they require an entirely new name,

00:27:03.600 They required entirely new identity.

00:27:05.780 And this is a very optimistic portrayal

00:27:08.840 because what it indicates is that

00:27:11.820 the possibility for this upward-spiraling sacrificial adventure

00:27:17.500 that defines identity is available to everyone,

00:27:20.780 no matter their starting place.

00:27:23.280 And that a lowly starting place is not necessarily an impediment.

00:27:27.680 It might even be an advantage.

00:27:29.580 Moses himself, for example, is born as a slave

00:27:32.740 and not only as a slave, but as a slave who's under the threat of death.

00:27:37.200 And then Christ himself, obviously, is born under conditions that are analogous

00:27:41.380 to parents who are poor in a town that's nondescript,

00:27:45.540 in a society that's subject to tyranny and religious hypocrisy,

00:27:50.400 and in an economic situation that's dire.

00:27:54.120 That's why he's born in a manger among the animals, right?

00:27:57.740 Threatened at birth.

00:27:58.720 And what that indicates is that the mere fact of lowly present status is no impediment whatsoever to the grand adventure of life.

00:28:07.660 And that's an extremely useful thing to know because that's the best inoculation against the temptation to portray yourself

00:28:17.320 and the impediments that you encounter, however arbitrarily, as you as victim, right?

00:28:25.900 The fact that you have impediments in your way and that you occupy a relatively nondescript

00:28:40.160 position, let's say in the socioeconomic hierarchy, in the status hierarchy, that's

00:28:47.300 no impediment to your upward moving sacrificial transformation.

00:28:53.020 And it might even be an aid.

00:28:55.340 You know, in the Gospels, a rich man has a discussion,

00:28:59.520 a rich young man has a discussion with Christ about his existential misery.

00:29:04.580 He says he's rich in all material ways.

00:29:07.660 And that he's a follower of the law.

00:29:09.680 He keeps the Ten Commandments.

00:29:11.580 He honors his parents and so forth.

00:29:13.940 And yet his life is still empty and without meaning.

00:29:16.260 And Christ listens to him and says,

00:29:19.060 it sounds to me like you have to sell everything you have and follow me.

00:29:22.480 And that's not a blanket communist condemnation of materiality and wealth.

00:29:30.960 It's a specific diagnosis for this young man that describes to him the fact that

00:29:40.260 his material comfort is, and perhaps material comfort itself as a pursuit or aim,

00:29:48.300 is insufficient to solve the existential problem of life.

00:29:52.480 And so Christ suggests to the wealthy young man

00:29:56.840 that his wealth is an impediment to his spiritual development

00:30:01.640 rather than something that's solving his problem

00:30:03.940 or furthering his development.

00:30:06.000 And, well, the disciples are all unhappy with that claim.

00:30:11.020 And they say, well, if that's the cost of salvation,

00:30:14.180 giving up all of your faulty security,

00:30:18.140 then who could possibly be saved?

00:30:20.420 And, of course, that is a very complex question.

00:30:23.040 Abraham faces this problem at the beginning of his adventure.

00:30:27.320 And he's an extremely interesting character because he has this, in a sense, he has the

00:30:34.900 socialist or materialist utopia at hand, right?

00:30:38.920 So his parents are rich.

00:30:40.180 That's what we know about him.

00:30:41.560 His parents are wealthy.

00:30:42.800 And what that means is he doesn't have to do anything to have his needs or maybe even his wants satisfied.

00:30:53.460 And so the rich young man in the gospel story suffers from the delusion that earthly bread is sufficient to bring about redemption.

00:31:04.060 And Christ suggests that the bread that descends from heaven is a necessary prerequisite for full development.

00:31:11.280 And that's something like that upward spiraling aim.

00:31:14.560 And Abraham experiences the same thing,

00:31:17.260 is that there's a disquiet in his heart,

00:31:20.420 despite the fact that he has everything that anyone could hope for or imagine,

00:31:25.820 given the conditions of his time.

00:31:27.680 Now, we have that problem in our culture.

00:31:29.920 I mean, one of the things that astute cultural observers have noted as of late,

00:31:35.060 that as we become more materially secure by international,

00:31:39.660 let's say, our historical standards, it isn't obvious that our lives have become richer and

00:31:45.460 deeper and more meaningful and more stable. In fact, there's some indication that the

00:31:50.180 contrary is happening. And what that does seem to imply is that man does not live by

00:31:55.260 bread alone, let's say. Now, why might that be? Well, Dostoevsky tried to work through

00:32:02.840 that problem very early on in the mid to late 1800s. He was a very astute critic of the socialist

00:32:12.740 utopian dreams of that time, which are very much like the same dreams in modern time. And he wrote

00:32:19.540 about this in a book called Notes from Underground, which is a character study of a deeply resentful

00:32:25.300 bureaucrat who was prone to shake his fist at God and curse the conditions of the world. And

00:32:32.000 the story is a confession on the part of this resentful person and an existential analysis

00:32:40.440 of his situation but the situation of human beings in general and Dostoevsky is trying to

00:32:45.940 take apart the problem with the claims of those who believe that a plentiful materialism would

00:32:51.560 be a utopia and he says he has his character say something like this imagine that you set up a

00:32:57.640 situation where men and women could do nothing but sit in bubbling pools of hot water and eat

00:33:05.320 cakes and busy themselves with the continuation of the species, which is as clear a vision of 0.80

00:33:11.680 California as any Russian managed in the 1800s. Well, you might say, well, what could be better 0.79

00:33:20.500 than that, right? It's a life of ease, a life of immediate hedonic gratification, hence the cakes,

00:33:25.720 a life of instantly satiated sexual desire.

00:33:30.000 All your needs are taken care of.

00:33:32.400 There's nothing but, what does he say,

00:33:33.820 bubbles of bliss floating up to the surface.

00:33:36.200 And then Dostoevsky puts his hallmark twist on the plot

00:33:42.540 and says, well, if you offered that to people,

00:33:44.880 because human beings are, this is said with tongue-in-cheek

00:33:47.820 to some degree, profoundly ungrateful

00:33:50.340 and able to curse in a manner that no other animal

00:33:52.960 has ever managed that what a human being would do if offered that static utopian materialist

00:34:00.360 perfection is look around desperately for some way to break it and shatter it just so that

00:34:06.440 something interesting and perverse could happen so that they would have something to do.

00:34:13.600 Right, and this is the conundrum essentially that Abraham faces because although he doesn't get

00:34:18.600 around to figuring it out till he's like 70, and so he's real failure to launch in an extreme case.

00:34:25.580 But what the story, it's a story of revelation and character development, and the revelation

00:34:32.920 is a revelation of God, and that's a definition that's offered within the story. So one of the

00:34:41.200 things that's worth understanding about the biblical library, because it is a library,

00:34:45.140 is that it's a collection of stories

00:34:46.980 and stories are portrayals of identity

00:34:49.720 and the biblical library offers

00:34:53.260 a multi-dimensional characterization

00:34:56.540 of God and man and woman.

00:34:59.600 And so our characters are very complex

00:35:02.080 and the character of what might be our highest aim

00:35:05.240 is very complex

00:35:06.120 and the only way that we can understand that

00:35:08.460 is to see it from very many different angles

00:35:11.240 and to infer something.

00:35:12.860 And in consequence, the biblical authors insisted that

00:35:17.400 these multidimensional characterizations, let's say, of God,

00:35:21.400 were reflective of something that at bottom was a unity.

00:35:25.560 That's the monotheistic hypothesis, or at the apex was a unity.

00:35:30.960 And so God might make himself manifest in many ways,

00:35:34.220 but what is being manifest is, in the final analysis,

00:35:38.380 something that's at the pinnacle or the foundation and a unity.

00:35:42.860 Now, in the story of Abraham, God has a very particular characterization,

00:35:48.160 and especially initially, because God comes to Abraham as something like the voice of adventure.

00:35:54.980 Okay, now this is very much worth taking apart.

00:35:58.580 What does it mean that God comes as the voice of adventure?

00:36:02.940 Well, we might first inquire into what an adventure is, and then also what the voice might be.

00:36:09.220 Now, an adventure is something that we appear to desire.

00:36:15.680 And that's something different than desiring, let's say,

00:36:19.340 the materialistic infantile security that Abraham has.

00:36:23.280 Now, when we go to movies, for example, or when we read stories or tell them,

00:36:27.280 we tend not to tell stories about people eating, right, or shopping.

00:36:33.960 You don't go to a movie and just watch two hours of rich Californians shopping

00:36:39.540 or people all around the world eating.

00:36:42.620 You go to the movies to see someone, well, to see someone what exactly?

00:36:47.000 Well, how about push themselves to the limit?

00:36:50.240 Something like that.

00:36:51.000 And not only that, but to push themselves to the limit, perhaps voluntarily,

00:36:55.780 and then to push themselves to the limit voluntarily in a manner that improves their character.

00:37:02.060 That would be a heroic struggle against insuperable odds and a triumph,

00:37:07.120 or a sequence of triumphs, or even better, a sequence of ever-improving triumphs,

00:37:12.260 which would be a lovely aim for your career, for example, or your marriage.

00:37:16.280 It's a very good way of conceptualizing identity, right?

00:37:19.040 It's not only an aim and the framework that an aim provides,

00:37:22.340 but a sequence of aims that become higher with each transformation

00:37:27.080 in a cycle that never ends and that spirals upward.

00:37:30.980 Upward toward what?

00:37:32.460 Well, the monotheistic hypothesis is that

00:37:35.160 the character that beckons at the pinnacle

00:37:38.900 of the upward spiral of transformation

00:37:40.860 is identical to God.

00:37:42.820 That's the definition.

00:37:44.340 So God is the up that lurks behind all upward aims.

00:37:49.060 That's a good way of thinking about it.

00:37:50.520 And that actually makes God something quite concrete.

00:37:52.980 And you can see that in the story of Abraham

00:37:55.080 because God comes to Abraham as the voice of adventure.

00:37:59.740 Now, we already characterized adventure.

00:38:02.060 It's an adventure to put yourself on the edge and dance there.

00:38:06.440 And you might say, well, why is that compelling?

00:38:09.720 And the answer has to be something like, well, because it's the process that fosters further development.

00:38:16.620 Like, one of the things you want to see with your kids, if you have an iota of sense,

00:38:20.920 is you don't want to see your kids packed in styrofoam and stored in the basement

00:38:27.040 where nothing can possibly damage them under any conditions whatsoever,

00:38:31.540 which would be your aim.

00:38:33.400 I mean, you could still feed them through a little opening in the styrofoam, I suppose,

00:38:37.100 but that isn't what you want.

00:38:39.120 You want your child to be out there contending with the world, right,

00:38:42.400 as a competitor, as someone who's striving upward,

00:38:46.300 who's continually expanding themselves beyond their current restrictions of their ability.

00:38:52.140 And insofar as you're a wise and encouraging parent,

00:38:54.940 you're going to push them to that edge, right?

00:38:58.500 And it's a very delicate place to be

00:39:00.380 because if you push too far, then they fall off the edge.

00:39:03.140 But if you don't push far enough,

00:39:05.380 then they don't develop as thoroughly as they might.

00:39:07.880 And partly what you're doing

00:39:09.200 when you develop a relationship with a child

00:39:11.860 is to determine the precise parameters

00:39:14.480 of that encouraging challenge, right?

00:39:17.040 Because some kids are very adventurous and exploratory

00:39:20.080 and you have to do a little bit of restricting on them

00:39:23.480 because they might bite off more than they can chew,

00:39:25.760 and then you might have a different kid who's relatively timid

00:39:28.540 and less prone to explore,

00:39:30.460 and you've got to kind of push them harder.

00:39:32.420 And it's the same with you, and it's the same with your friends,

00:39:35.200 and developing a relationship in part is determining

00:39:38.360 exactly the battle between the provision of security

00:39:42.620 and the provision of encouragement and challenge

00:39:44.540 that optimally develops the person.

00:39:46.720 That's what you want in a marriage.

00:39:48.060 The word Eve means in Hebrew something like, 0.78

00:39:52.500 It's partly iserkonegdo is what Eve is.

00:39:56.960 And it means something like combatant and ally in something approximating a military struggle.

00:40:05.220 And so that's a very useful thing to know is that to be married is to have someone with you

00:40:09.860 so that you can battle as a unity against the social and natural catastrophes of life.

00:40:16.500 but also so that within the relationship

00:40:18.760 each of you puts the other on the edge

00:40:21.780 in a manner that makes you both develop

00:40:23.580 and that furthers the development of the relationship, right?

00:40:26.520 And that's a challenge and that's an adventure

00:40:28.700 and that's a romantic adventure

00:40:31.340 and, of course, one of the fundamental fiction tropes

00:40:35.880 in movies is romantic adventure, right?

00:40:38.700 I mean, James Bond stories, for example,

00:40:40.980 which are clear hero stories,

00:40:42.540 although at a rather, what would you say,

00:40:45.220 They're not overwhelmingly sophisticated, but they're clearly romantic adventures.

00:40:50.820 And that would mean that the highest form of challenging adventure is both the adventure

00:40:55.680 that challenges and that provides romance.

00:40:59.200 And to be able to combine those is, well, that would be the ultimate goal of a marriage.

00:41:03.880 The ultimate goal of relationship between man and woman would be a romantic adventure.

00:41:08.020 And the adventure is there because you don't, you aren't constructed so that enough is enough.

00:41:14.500 You're not an infant who's satiated by the provision of what's necessary for, what would

00:41:23.160 you say, the gratification of your basic instincts.

00:41:26.100 It's an insufficient way of conceptualizing people.

00:41:29.040 It's a meaningless way of conceptualizing people.

00:41:31.720 It's a way of remaining immature as well and hedonistic and maybe eventually narcissistic

00:41:36.320 and psychopathic to only pursue that.

00:41:39.460 You're pursuing this upward aiming transformation.

00:41:42.640 Now, God comes to Abraham as the voice of adventure.

00:41:46.400 So what does that mean exactly?

00:41:48.080 Well, voice.

00:41:49.260 Well, revelations come to people in a variety of forms.

00:41:54.200 And this is a useful thing to know because modern people have no idea, generally speaking,

00:41:59.600 what is meant by God, let's say, at the level of definition.

00:42:05.460 And the Old Testament stories, in particular, make that quite concrete.

00:42:11.240 One of the definitions of God is the impulse to adventure.

00:42:15.020 And so that would be the impulse that makes your son,

00:42:18.080 when he's young, jump out of bed and want to face the world, right?

00:42:21.320 To take on a new challenge.

00:42:23.720 You could think about it as the deepest of instincts.

00:42:26.520 If you think about instinct as part of the force that impels people to develop.

00:42:31.100 I don't really care if you build it from the bottom up

00:42:33.160 or you think about it from the top down.

00:42:34.900 It boils down to the same thing.

00:42:37.980 And what does it mean by a voice?

00:42:39.300 Well, you know, when you're sitting there trying to solve a problem, you have a problem,

00:42:43.560 whatever it might be, the spirit that answers that question, which is what happens when

00:42:51.040 you think, makes itself manifest in a number of potential forces, forms.

00:42:57.200 You might have a feeling about what to do, right?

00:42:59.920 An emotional impulse to move one way or another.

00:43:02.620 You might have an image of what needs to be done next, of what pathway you should choose

00:43:08.600 to solve the problem that's confronting you.

00:43:10.600 Or if you think in words,

00:43:12.640 the solution might come to you in words.

00:43:15.060 And to some degree,

00:43:17.340 that would be a manifestation of the logos

00:43:19.220 if the voice that comes to you in words

00:43:21.800 is impelling you upward

00:43:23.360 to further characterological development.

00:43:26.240 And we don't exactly know

00:43:28.420 how God makes himself manifest to Abraham

00:43:31.320 when he first appears,

00:43:33.040 but it appears that it's in something like a voice

00:43:36.080 because Abraham is instructed in one way or another

00:43:40.520 to leave the comfort of his home,

00:43:43.640 to leave his tent, to leave the security that he has

00:43:46.460 that's real behind and to go out into the world.

00:43:51.080 Okay, so what does that mean?

00:43:52.740 That's a definition of God.

00:43:54.640 God is the spirit that impels even the secure

00:43:57.320 out into the world to have the adventure of their life.

00:44:00.380 And you might say, well, do you believe in that?

00:44:02.160 Well, did you leave home?

00:44:04.560 Well, but that's actually the right question,

00:44:08.460 because if you left home in the faith that you could make your way,

00:44:14.160 in the faith that you making your way in the absence of the comforts of your home

00:44:18.260 was preferable to remaining undeveloped and infantile

00:44:23.080 in the secure bosom even of your wealthy family,

00:44:26.460 then you indicated your belief in that call to adventure.

00:44:30.500 and the indication of your belief

00:44:33.880 wouldn't precisely be a statement about what you believe.

00:44:37.440 It would be the fact that you left

00:44:38.980 and not everybody does leave

00:44:40.900 and when they don't, that's pretty ugly.

00:44:44.420 And so the consequence, seriously,

00:44:46.140 the consequence of delayed maturation

00:44:48.120 and the abdication of the responsibility

00:44:51.580 to heed that call of adventure,

00:44:53.260 that's the Oedipal nightmare from the Freudian perspective.

00:44:55.700 It's a very bad thing.

00:44:57.520 If we require adventure to tolerate the burden of life without resentment, let's say,

00:45:05.200 because you need an adventure to justify the difficult conditions of your life,

00:45:09.840 then if you forego that and all you have to protect yourself against existential catastrophe

00:45:16.680 is the mere provision of infantile material security, that's just not going to do it for you.

00:45:24.380 It's not going to do it for you at all.

00:45:26.100 And you can be depressed and miserable and bitter and resentful

00:45:28.940 and murderous and genocidal in the presence of plenty of wealth

00:45:33.660 because that's not enough.

00:45:35.160 And so if you forego the call of the spear of adventure

00:45:39.140 to languish in infantile security,

00:45:43.120 it isn't merely that you lack the adventure,

00:45:45.900 even though that's a catastrophe.

00:45:47.360 It's that that lack will corrupt you in a deadly manner.

00:45:51.880 And Abraham, to his credit, even though he's 70, decides to take the risk.

00:45:57.840 And that's heartening.

00:46:00.200 That means we can start to follow his development.

00:46:02.720 It also means that there's hope for everyone.

00:46:05.160 Because if Abraham could pull it off at 70, then, you know, maybe you're sitting in the audience thinking,

00:46:11.380 you know, oh my God, I'm 45 and things have barely got going for me and it's too late.

00:46:15.580 It's like, it's never too late.

00:46:18.400 You know, there is a price to be paid for waiting, but further waiting does not reduce that price.

00:46:26.840 And so, there is an insistence in the gospel accounts that the true followers of Christ

00:46:38.080 have their lamps lit and their wicks prepared and they're willing to move at the drop of a hat.

00:46:45.120 And what that is, is an indication that the time to act in relationship to the upward aim is now.

00:46:52.160 And it doesn't matter what then was.

00:46:55.520 It's still now.

00:46:56.700 And if you seize the moment, let's say, even if you've delayed 70 years, as in the case of Abraham,

00:47:02.600 then if it's a true seizing of the moment, well, then you can still make your way upward.

00:47:08.140 And maybe you can even redeem your past in doing that.

00:47:11.180 And maybe you could even make all those delayed years

00:47:14.060 just for the grist for the mill

00:47:16.960 so that you would be able to take what you've wasted

00:47:20.320 and use it now in a way that actually fulfills the promise

00:47:24.880 of those wasted decades 1.00

00:47:26.600 because you can learn from your own stupidity 1.00

00:47:29.640 and failure. 1.00

00:47:34.620 So Abraham decides to do this.

00:47:37.620 Okay, that's his covenant with God.

00:47:41.180 Now this is a very useful thing to understand because one of the things that's mysterious about the Old Testament text in particular is this notion of covenantal relationship.

00:47:51.400 A covenant is like a contract and human beings exist in relationship.

00:47:58.340 Like we exist in relationship to ourselves, we exist in relationship to the world, we exist in relationship to other people.

00:48:04.400 the monotheistic

00:48:06.700 hypothesis on the narrative end

00:48:08.440 is that we also exist in relationship

00:48:10.560 to the unity that's

00:48:12.400 at the highest pinnacle.

00:48:14.800 And the covenant we have

00:48:16.540 is in agreement with that

00:48:18.200 higher unity. Now

00:48:20.280 what's the nature of the covenant

00:48:22.580 and the agreement? Well it's something like

00:48:24.380 this. It's something like

00:48:26.240 your belief that you can leave

00:48:28.300 home. Right? Because

00:48:29.840 there's a presumption that

00:48:32.320 accompanies that

00:48:33.260 daring action. The presumption is if you leave home and you do that in the appropriate mature

00:48:41.660 manner, then that's the best pathway to future thriving, right? And that's a contractual

00:48:47.780 arrangement. You're making a deal, in a sense, with the world. Your part of the deal is you get

00:48:53.740 the hell up and you get away from your zone of comfort and you take some risks and you develop

00:48:58.080 your character, and the return that you expect in the contractual manner is that fate will smile on

00:49:04.860 you insofar as it's capable of smiling on you, that you'll increase the probability that fate

00:49:10.380 will smile on you by undertaking the appropriate adventure of your life. And you know that this is

00:49:15.520 true because that's what you encourage your children to do, is you don't tell them, look kid,

00:49:20.480 do your best, that's the quickest pathway to frustrating failure. No one, no one who isn't

00:49:27.280 perverse to the core ever sits down and teaches their children that. Even if you've had a life

00:49:33.320 that's been very difficult and your struggles have met with, you know, sequential failure,

00:49:38.540 sometimes merely as a result of perverse fate, you still want to instill the faith in your children

00:49:43.620 that if they have the adventure of their life and take on the challenges that are in front of them,

00:49:48.340 that that's the best pathway forward. And that's a statement of faith, right? And it's a contractual

00:49:54.000 relationship with well with being itself or even with the spirit of being itself and it's it's part

00:50:01.040 of the faith that underlies your decision to move forward into the world now the same thing happens

00:50:07.220 repeatedly in your life and you know this too because there are opportunities that make

00:50:12.700 themselves manifest to you as you develop as an adult that call to you or that torment your

00:50:19.100 conscience, and that offer you the possibility of shifting your aim and your focus, right?

00:50:24.740 And so maybe you have a profession, you're young and you have a profession, but there's always

00:50:29.920 something that you really wanted to do. You know, maybe you wanted to travel the world, or maybe

00:50:35.100 you want to find the partner that is going to challenge you optimally, or maybe you want to

00:50:41.980 start a new business, or maybe you want to pursue an interest that you find deeply meaningful.

00:50:49.100 And your willingness to take that risk is your manifestation of faith

00:50:58.340 in something like a covenantal or contractual relationship.

00:51:00.880 If you decide to go off the beaten path and to follow what calls to you,

00:51:06.580 that's the voice of adventure that's calling to you.

00:51:08.840 It says it calls to you in the form of that which grips your interest

00:51:13.580 and compels you forward.

00:51:15.300 And you can dare in consequence.

00:51:17.300 And you know perfectly well if you review your life biographically that the best moments in your life come when you take a courageous and calculated risk and you commit to it fully and you transform your character and the world around you in consequence of that.

00:51:34.180 and in the times that you're facing the dark night of the soul

00:51:38.040 and you're depressed and anxious and hopeless,

00:51:40.420 you can refer back to those moments of sacrificial success

00:51:45.400 and soothe your soul in consequence of understanding

00:51:49.240 that at least at some points in your miserable existence,

00:51:52.720 you aimed properly and hit the target.

00:51:55.460 And that begs the question, and the question is,

00:51:57.940 well, what would your life be like if you did nothing but that?

00:52:00.900 And that's what Abraham decides to do.

00:52:03.520 See, not only does he decide that he's going to follow the voice of adventure,

00:52:07.020 but he commits to it fully.

00:52:08.700 Now, that doesn't mean he's perfect at it to begin with, and he's not.

00:52:12.260 He's still a pretty unreliable character at the beginning of his adventure.

00:52:17.180 It's like Jacob is.

00:52:18.680 Jacob's a cheat and a thief at the beginning of his adventure,

00:52:22.780 and he still becomes a nation-defining hero.

00:52:27.880 And Abraham, despite his incredibly late start, becomes the father of nations.

00:52:33.600 And so that's a hell of a promise.

00:52:35.020 Now that's the next part of the story, because we've already got like one sentence in.

00:52:39.620 And so, that's the next part of the story, because God makes Abraham an offer.

00:52:45.800 And it's a very short offer, and it's easy just to read over it and not really notice.

00:52:50.300 But it's very useful to offer, or to attend to, because it's actually the offer of adventure.

00:52:57.140 Right?

00:52:57.400 So what God describes to Abraham, so this is the voice that comes to Abraham that says

00:53:01.780 to him, get away from your family and your tent and your zone of comfort.

00:53:05.820 Get away out into the world.

00:53:07.140 It's the same voice that comes to you when you're inclined to take a calculated and daring

00:53:12.520 risk, right?

00:53:13.840 Not because you want to, what, show yourself to others falsely as capable of doing that,

00:53:20.200 but because you know that there's something there that's worth pursuing, right?

00:53:23.740 Something that you should take the responsibility for.

00:53:26.280 Something that would make you more than you are.

00:53:28.780 And that maybe would spill over to others.

00:53:30.820 And that's what God tells Abraham.

00:53:33.000 And this is, it's such an optimistic idea.

00:53:36.080 And I think fundamentally we all believe it.

00:53:38.560 So God says to Abraham, if you keep your covenant with me,

00:53:43.400 we already described what that is,

00:53:45.200 then you'll be a blessing to yourself.

00:53:48.540 Now that's a good deal, right?

00:53:50.380 Because it's rare that any of us who aren't narcissistic

00:53:54.220 could do it falsely, regard ourselves as blessings to ourself, right? I mean, one of the things I

00:53:58.880 really learned as a clinician is that most people are much harder on themselves than they are on

00:54:03.980 other people. And part of the reason for that is most of us use approximately the same standards

00:54:09.920 to judge ourselves that we use to judge other people, or maybe we're even harder on ourselves,

00:54:14.940 which, by the way, isn't a virtue. It's one of the more attractive vices, right? Because it's,

00:54:21.280 if you had to choose between being harder on yourself or other on other people,

00:54:25.780 I think it's more virtuous to be harder on yourself.

00:54:28.880 But it's better to regard yourself appropriately and in a caring manner

00:54:34.480 in the same way that you would regard someone that you cared for.

00:54:37.980 That's a better way of being.

00:54:39.780 And people aren't that good at that,

00:54:41.880 partly because they know all their own flaws.

00:54:44.540 Right?

00:54:44.720 I mean, you know it.

00:54:45.640 You might not want to know it,

00:54:47.100 but you know everything terrible you ever did.

00:54:48.960 And that means you know a lot more about how terrible you are than anyone else.

00:54:53.060 And that's a hell of a burden to take on.

00:54:56.540 But you see, what God offers Abraham in this covenant is that

00:54:59.880 if he hearkens to the voice of adventure, then he'll become a blessing to himself.

00:55:04.440 And that's what that rich young man that's talking with Christ lacks, right?

00:55:09.160 He's not in harmony with, what, his deepest self?

00:55:12.680 It's something like that.

00:55:14.520 And so you can think about this even biologically.

00:55:18.140 and I think that's very useful.

00:55:19.620 So imagine that your child has an instinct

00:55:21.480 that impels him to mature and expand.

00:55:25.160 Well, the offer that God makes Abraham

00:55:28.080 is equivalent to the statement 0.94

00:55:29.800 that the child who follows that instinct

00:55:32.980 to expand and develop

00:55:34.400 has the highest probability of living in a manner

00:55:38.120 that will reconcile himself to himself

00:55:41.280 or maybe even more than reconcile

00:55:43.900 like you could,

00:55:45.320 like you can live in harmony with other people,

00:55:47.420 Like, you can be happy that other people are around.

00:55:51.100 You could be happy and live in harmony with yourself in the same manner, right?

00:55:56.940 It's a very difficult thing to pull off,

00:55:58.740 given the depth of your knowledge about your own inadequacy.

00:56:01.780 But the offer that God makes to Abraham is that

00:56:04.300 if he keeps his covenant with regards to adventure,

00:56:08.620 that his life will transform so that he will regard himself as a blessing to himself.

00:56:14.060 Now, that's a good deal, and such an optimistic deal,

00:56:16.560 because what it posits is that if you pursued the deepest desires of your heart,

00:56:25.180 that's what Pinocchio does when he wishes upon a star,

00:56:28.060 that's the thing that moves him away from being a marionette

00:56:33.220 that's the puppet of forces beyond his control

00:56:36.080 to being something that's truly autonomous and real.

00:56:39.420 If you followed the impulse of adventure,

00:56:42.700 which would be the call of the deepest part of your soul,

00:56:45.420 that that would transform your life that would make you a blessing to yourself.

00:56:49.580 There isn't a better deal than that.

00:56:51.660 That's a great deal because it means you could have what you want and need

00:56:55.780 if you asked for it.

00:56:57.540 And if you did that properly, then it would reconcile yourself to yourself.

00:57:02.320 That's a great deal, man.

00:57:04.040 But that's not the whole deal.

00:57:05.820 It's one quarter of the deal.

00:57:07.880 So the next thing that God tells Abraham is that he tells him four things.

00:57:12.920 I don't know if I'll get the order right, but I know all four of them.

00:57:16.060 He says, not only will you become a blessing to yourself,

00:57:22.540 but you'll do that in a manner that will establish your reputation as stellar within your community.

00:57:30.700 Now, that's a great deal, too, because it is important to all of us to have a stellar reputation.

00:57:38.740 Psychopaths, narcissists, criminals, Machiavellians,

00:57:42.440 they game the reputational system to obtain that advantage.

00:57:46.720 But it can be done genuinely, and you know that,

00:57:49.020 because you know there are people around you who you esteem,

00:57:52.660 and others that you don't, and those that you esteem have a reputation,

00:57:56.460 which is what you think of them.

00:57:57.940 And if their reputation is genuine, the reason that you esteem them

00:58:03.600 is because the manner in which they've conducted themselves

00:58:06.740 has been a benefit to you and perhaps to other people.

00:58:10.020 And those are the people who are stellar in the most fundamental sense.

00:58:13.520 Those are the people, by the way, who become elders in traditional communities.

00:58:17.780 You know, the radical critique of the left is that

00:58:20.640 those who rise up the status hierarchy are people who manipulate and use power.

00:58:25.480 And there's no anthropological evidence for that.

00:58:28.140 That happens when systems fail.

00:58:30.440 But when they're successful, the people who develop high esteem,

00:58:34.760 let's say, in the imaginations of others, they're not necessarily at all the people who occupy

00:58:40.000 positions of power. They're people who've conducted themselves in a manner that makes

00:58:43.800 everyone want to line up to talk to them when they're in trouble, right? And so you evaluate

00:58:49.480 someone like that as you look at how they conduct themselves in their life, you look at the

00:58:53.740 adventures they have, you analyze the story they've acted out, and you come to the conclusion that

00:58:58.500 that's the sort of person you would like to have on your side when the waves rise and the winds

00:59:04.120 blow and the storms at hand. And so God's offer to Abraham is that if he follows the call of

00:59:11.240 adventure, then he'll be a blessing to himself, but in a manner that will genuinely provide his

00:59:16.600 name with esteem. And so that's a good deal. And it speaks of a kind of harmony, right? It's a very

00:59:21.700 cool harmony. It's a three-part harmony, you might say. So there's an instinct within you that compels

00:59:27.180 you to develop upward. And if you develop that instinct, then you exist in harmony with yourself.

00:59:32.600 but at the same time, that harmony can be deep enough

00:59:35.540 so that it produces a harmony between you and other people

00:59:38.660 that other people can note and appreciate.

00:59:42.700 And so there's nothing selfish about that, right?

00:59:45.800 And it means that you are pursuing your own adventure

00:59:48.460 but it doesn't mean at all that you're doing that at the expense of other people.

00:59:52.340 Quite the contrary, if you pursued, this is the offer,

00:59:55.980 if you pursued the adventure of your life properly,

00:59:58.300 you would do it in a manner that would be so beneficial to other people

01:00:01.260 that they would note that.

01:00:02.600 right? And so that's a great deal, and it's a great deal because, well, people are happy if

01:00:09.100 they're not cynical that other people think well of them, but it's also a very important form of

01:00:15.280 provision of security and opportunity, let's say, for you and your family, because there's nothing

01:00:20.860 that's more valuable to you than your reputation, like broadly conceptualized. That's the most

01:00:26.460 certain form of wealth, what other people think of you, like fundamentally think of you, and so

01:00:32.000 that's how you establish a harmonious relationship with the community. And the hypothesis in the

01:00:36.800 story of Abraham is that the instinct that impels us upward is the same instinct that

01:00:43.340 gives us genuine status in the eyes of people who can really see who we are.

01:00:48.680 That's a good deal. And that's not the end of it. That's only two parts of the offer. The third part

01:00:53.640 is that Abraham is offered the opportunity to establish a dynasty, to become the father of

01:01:00.620 nations. Now that's a really interesting offer. It's very

01:01:04.680 complicated. What it means in part is, it's a hypothesis

01:01:08.920 again, what it means in part is that if you follow that

01:01:12.820 impulse to develop yourself upward, that

01:01:16.040 that impulse would motivate you to

01:01:20.620 act in a manner that would best guarantee the establishment

01:01:24.520 of something permanent. So there's a lot of emphasis

01:01:28.600 in the Old and New Testament and many religious traditions in living life eternal. And it's easy

01:01:34.540 for us to think about that as some vision of life after death. And I'm not going to address that

01:01:41.200 issue. But what it also means is that there's a mode of being that works now and tomorrow and

01:01:48.920 next week and next month and next year and 10 years down the road and 100 years down the road

01:01:54.740 and 1,000 years down the road

01:01:56.560 and maybe 10,000 years down the road.

01:01:59.360 And so you could imagine it this way.

01:02:01.800 So possibly you people in the audience

01:02:06.120 had a good relationship with your father.

01:02:08.380 But whether you did or not,

01:02:10.300 let's imagine that you had a good relationship

01:02:12.120 with your father sometimes

01:02:13.660 or that there were other people in your life,

01:02:17.000 real or fictional,

01:02:18.460 who fulfilled that role.

01:02:20.680 Okay, so now imagine that

01:02:22.040 that role of good father is a pattern, and it's a pattern that propagates across time.

01:02:30.780 It's abstracted and eternal. That's a good way of thinking about it. Now, when you grow up and

01:02:35.300 you have children, you become a father, which is kind of a generic role, right? Your child calls

01:02:42.000 you dad. He doesn't call you your name. And the reason for that, or a reason for that, is that

01:02:47.780 your role is what that role you've allowed that role of benevolent father to possess you and

01:02:55.520 you're acting that out and in acting that out you're doing everything you can to ensure not

01:03:01.760 only the survival of your children but they're thriving and then not not only their survival

01:03:06.780 and they're thriving but their survival and they're thriving in a manner that makes them

01:03:10.800 most likely to be good parents to their to their own children and so on down the generations and

01:03:17.060 And you could imagine being a father so stellar that your reputation would shine so brightly

01:03:22.520 that it was a real, it was, what would you say?

01:03:26.820 It was an injunction to imitation on the part of your son.

01:03:30.840 And so he conducted himself as the proper father.

01:03:33.760 And then his child did that and so on for God only knows how long.

01:03:38.940 And the offer that God makes Abraham is that if you fulfilled the call to adventure thoroughly enough,

01:03:45.600 you would learn how to partake in the pattern of fatherhood

01:03:49.800 that would most functionally propagate itself

01:03:55.580 down the generations for the longest period of time.

01:03:59.180 Now, you know that if a family is corrupted and broken,

01:04:03.540 that that can be transferred down the generations.

01:04:09.120 Everyone knows that.

01:04:10.680 And so, what that implies is that the opposite is also true,

01:04:14.000 is that insofar as you are the standard-bearer

01:04:17.660 for the pattern of benevolent father,

01:04:20.360 for that eternal pattern,

01:04:21.940 then you're partaking in a pattern of attention and action

01:04:24.960 or a pattern of character or a story

01:04:27.560 that most probably, most probably and most likely

01:04:33.740 ensures the establishment of your dynasty.

01:04:38.460 And that could be true biologically

01:04:40.160 insofar as that's part of what parents do,

01:04:43.460 what fathers do, to ensure reproductive success beyond mere sex, to be a good father, to be

01:04:51.360 committed to the marriage, to be committed to the children, to have a long-term sacrificial view,

01:04:56.200 to live for the future, that works. And human beings are long-lived, multi-generationally

01:05:02.640 long-lived, in part because our examples as parents are so important. It's not just sex

01:05:08.480 and that's reproduction. 0.99

01:05:09.740 That's complete bloody nonsense. 0.99

01:05:11.940 It's sex as a precondition for reproduction, obviously, 0.99

01:05:15.660 but then the pattern of parenthood

01:05:18.240 that increases the probability that your children will thrive

01:05:22.180 and they'll thrive as children and they'll thrive as adults

01:05:24.560 and they'll thrive as parents and so on down the generations.

01:05:27.860 And it's not only on the biological side that this is true

01:05:31.180 because you could also imagine that

01:05:33.480 if Abraham acts out his commitment to the adventure that develops him,

01:05:40.780 then whatever he touches is going to take on that virtue.

01:05:44.960 And so if he establishes a business or an enterprise or a friendship or a marriage,

01:05:51.620 that that's also likely to thrive in a manner that's permanent

01:05:54.420 and that establishes the pattern for that sort of enterprise or marriage.

01:05:59.380 And that's life in eternity, and that's what God offers Abraham.

01:06:02.480 And so that's a really cool thing to know because what it implies is that if you hearkened to the call that pulls you out of your zone of comfort and you did that reliably, like let's say at every opportunity, right, that you would develop into the sort of person that would be a blessing to himself, that would have a stellar reputation, that would have the largest possible chance of establishing something permanent and of value.

01:06:29.420 And so, that's a good deal.

01:06:32.000 And these are the, what would you say,

01:06:33.920 these are the non-materialistic benefits,

01:06:41.500 rewards of this adventurous sacrificial pathway.

01:06:47.040 Abraham already had what he needed to survive, right?

01:06:51.160 He already had enough to eat.

01:06:53.060 He already had comfort.

01:06:54.820 And so, you might say, well, what's better than comfort?

01:06:57.480 And that's a good question.

01:06:59.420 I mean we're so desperate for what's better than comfort that we'll pick unnecessary misery as a

01:07:05.760 false adventure in preference to comfort and that's something to really understand that's

01:07:10.360 what Dostoevsky pointed out when he said that if you gave people nothing but a material paradise

01:07:15.200 they would smash it into bits just so that something exciting could happen that's the

01:07:19.600 downside of not heeding the call of adventure is that false adventures will be very attractive to

01:07:24.460 you that's why people have affairs for example or one of the reasons they have affairs or why they 0.99

01:07:29.040 cause, maybe your life is being characterized by a pattern of the stupid trouble that you caused 1.00

01:07:35.200 yourself. And you might ask yourself, well, if you were doing something truly vital, maybe you 1.00

01:07:40.200 wouldn't be tempted to do the foolish things that make your life interesting, but, you know, in a

01:07:45.960 very counterproductive and suffering-inducing manner. And that's really worth thinking about.

01:07:51.400 Like, if you're tempted by the spirit that wants to shatter your comfort, it's very likely that

01:07:58.700 the reason for that is that you haven't taken on enough adventurous responsibility voluntarily.

01:08:04.640 Because if you had, you'd have enough to do. You wouldn't need the unnecessary trouble. You might

01:08:10.500 not want the unnecessary trouble because it would get in the way. And it has to get in the way of

01:08:14.900 something important because unnecessary trouble is pretty interesting, right? That's perhaps part

01:08:20.980 of the reason why Eve plucked the apple off the tree in the Garden of Eden to begin with. It was

01:08:26.240 like a little unnecessary trouble is quite the pathological adventure. And the replacement for

01:08:32.100 a pathological adventure is not infantile satisfaction, it's genuine adventure. And so

01:08:38.480 then there's one other element of offering in the Abrahamic story. Abraham says, or God says,

01:08:47.700 you'll also do all this in a way that will be maximally beneficial to everyone else.

01:08:52.180 And so it presents the world that you act in,

01:08:56.860 let's say, not as a zero-sum game

01:08:59.060 because you might be cynical and say,

01:09:01.020 well, you have to get what you can for you

01:09:03.560 because there's not that much to go around

01:09:05.380 and whatever you get is yours

01:09:07.820 and because there's a limited amount,

01:09:10.220 other people can't have it too.

01:09:11.900 Or you could take a contrary view,

01:09:14.060 which is the correct view, by the way,

01:09:16.460 that there's more than enough of everything to go around

01:09:18.860 if people comport themselves properly

01:09:20.580 and that if you had the genuine adventure of your life,

01:09:24.140 none of that would have to be a zero-sum game.

01:09:26.560 You could do it in a way that simultaneously improved the probability

01:09:29.980 that everybody around you would have the adventure of their life.

01:09:32.940 And then that would really be a good deal for you.

01:09:35.140 Imagine that in your business dealings,

01:09:36.920 and this isn't just some utopian dream.

01:09:39.620 I mean, if you can set up a business relationship with someone

01:09:42.540 so that you're doing something that's unbelievably interesting and compelling

01:09:46.260 and that you regard as worthwhile and that leads you upward,

01:09:48.800 and then you make a negotiated covenant with someone else

01:09:52.360 and you make an arrangement so that they have their own domain of adventure

01:09:56.480 that has just as much possibility of expanding,

01:09:59.640 then they're hyper-motivated to do that

01:10:01.600 and the two of you together are going to be much more effective

01:10:04.660 than either of you would be apart

01:10:06.560 and that's exactly what you're supposed to do in a marriage.

01:10:09.280 If marriage was a zero-sum game, then everyone would be,

01:10:13.660 no, why would you get married? 0.92

01:10:15.040 That would be ludicrous. 0.64

01:10:16.580 if it's a negotiated story that has an endless upward orientation and possibility for further

01:10:25.920 development, then it's obvious why you'd engage in it, and people do engage in it, and we engage

01:10:31.320 in it in the faith, fundamentally, that it's better to make a long-term arrangement with

01:10:36.160 someone that's based on trust and possibility than it is to maintain that immature commitment

01:10:41.480 to, let's say, sequential, responsibility-less relationships

01:10:45.260 and, you know, nightly, short-term sexual gratification.

01:10:50.300 It's better.

01:10:51.400 It's not just that you should do it.

01:10:53.480 It's not just that it's a duty, right?

01:10:55.940 Although it is those things as well.

01:10:57.680 That's not the offer.

01:10:59.260 The offer is, no, it's just way better.

01:11:01.420 And I can give you a very comical example of that.

01:11:04.460 And there's recent data showing,

01:11:06.220 I think this is like one of the most hilarious things I've ever read,

01:11:08.800 is the people who have the most sex 0.96

01:11:10.980 are religious married people. 1.00

01:11:14.840 Right, that's so comical. 0.99

01:11:17.120 It's so ridiculously funny

01:11:18.620 because it's exactly the inverse of what,

01:11:21.060 let's say, we were promised

01:11:22.240 with the dawn of the sexual revolution 0.58

01:11:24.080 because the idea was supposed to be,

01:11:26.120 well, we have reliable contraception,

01:11:29.020 let's say, if it's used properly

01:11:30.400 and there's the rub.

01:11:31.840 And because of that, well, anything goes.

01:11:33.820 And then you think, well, everybody's just like

01:11:35.680 the Californians in the Dostoevsky story 0.87

01:11:38.100 and there's just sex everywhere

01:11:39.620 and I suppose in some ways that worked for about four years in the 1960s

01:11:43.800 before things fell apart.

01:11:45.260 And what we are seeing is that one of the consequences

01:11:48.660 of that hedonistic approach to sexual gratification

01:11:52.900 is that sex itself disappears.

01:11:55.760 It's like 30%. 0.54

01:11:56.740 It's something like 30% of Japanese people under 30 now are virgins. 1.00

01:12:00.980 And they're just ahead of the curve. 1.00

01:12:03.980 Like the same thing is happening in North America.

01:12:05.840 And one of the consequences of the pursuit of narrow, hedonistic sexual gratification

01:12:11.740 is that sex itself starts to become impossible, which is ridiculously comical.

01:12:18.620 And so it might even be, it could easily be that the world is set up so that

01:12:22.820 the more committed you are, I'm sure this is the case,

01:12:26.780 the more committed you are to an ideal monogamous relationship

01:12:31.620 and the negotiation that goes along with that,

01:12:33.700 the more stellar your sexual life, and that seems, I think that's incontrovertibly indicated by the

01:12:39.940 data that we have at hand, but I also think it's part of the promise that's implicit in the notion

01:12:44.640 that marriage is a sacred and functional sacrificial enterprise, and so it's not just what

01:12:51.500 you should do, or what you're duty-bound to do, or even what you do when you mature, it's actually

01:12:56.120 the best solution to the problem. I think there's no doubt about that, all protestations to the

01:13:02.940 contrary. And so what does Abraham do? Well, he builds an altar and he makes a sacrifice and

01:13:10.720 cements his covenant to God. And then as Abraham's story develops, his character transforms, right?

01:13:18.780 So he pursues an aim and then he learns something as a consequence of the pursuit

01:13:24.460 and his aim transforms. And so he becomes a slightly different character, which is

01:13:28.780 What happens to you as you pursue the opportunities of your life?

01:13:32.860 He starts out as Abram, A-B-R-A-M, and ends up as Abraham, who is the father of nations.

01:13:39.520 Because as he pursues his ever-expanding field of adventure, and has more and more adventures,

01:13:47.280 his character expands and develops so that he becomes, he's more in touch with what's sacred and foundational.

01:13:54.480 There's more to him.

01:13:56.120 He's called upon at every transformative point in his life

01:14:00.380 to make a sacrifice.

01:14:02.480 And this is something that people have a hard time understanding

01:14:05.180 in relationship to these archaic texts,

01:14:07.160 is why were these ancient people so obsessed with the ritual of sacrifice?

01:14:11.800 And the answer to that is, well, they're acting something out.

01:14:14.500 And once you understand it, you can see why they were acting it out

01:14:17.360 and why it's necessary.

01:14:18.620 I used to ask my students at the University of Toronto,

01:14:22.220 a lot of whom were Asian, children of first-generation immigrants,

01:14:26.800 I said, what did your parents have to sacrifice so that you could be at university?

01:14:30.860 And believe me, the children of first-generation immigrants, Asian immigrants,

01:14:34.860 they knew what their parents had sacrificed.

01:14:37.300 Because they had been told what the sacrifice was plenty.

01:14:40.840 And that burden was on them, as it should have been.

01:14:43.100 But they knew what it meant.

01:14:44.760 And what it means is that to stabilize the future and to make it a place of opportunity

01:14:50.060 and to serve your family and your community properly,

01:14:53.120 you have to engage in sacrifice.

01:14:55.060 And what's the sacrifice? 1.00

01:14:56.340 Well, it's the sacrifice of your immature, short-term, foolish, self-oriented whims. 0.99

01:15:02.520 And you can understand this in your own life. 0.97

01:15:05.020 You know this, that as the fields of opportunity that present themselves to you expand,

01:15:10.540 assuming they do,

01:15:12.000 you know that with each expansion of opportunity, 0.83

01:15:14.620 you're called upon to leave something childish and foolish behind in the past.

01:15:18.240 You know, you may find that maybe you were someone who really enjoyed alcohol,

01:15:23.300 but now you're in a position of responsibility where you can't risk that hedonistic immediate pleasure

01:15:28.880 because there's too much riding on you so that you can have that foolish adventure without undue cost.

01:15:36.660 And with every step upward, let's say up Jacob's ladder to heaven,

01:15:41.420 with every step upward, you're called upon to mark the occasion with the sacrifice.

01:15:45.460 And the sacrifice is the elimination of the remnants of your old identity,

01:15:50.160 immature identity, insufficient identity,

01:15:52.940 in a way that allows you to grow into the person you need to be

01:15:55.800 to take advantage of the current opportunity.

01:15:58.560 And there's, in principle, no end to that transformation.

01:16:02.160 And that's, when Christ talks about the straight, narrow path

01:16:06.480 and the kingdom of heaven,

01:16:09.440 part of what he's referring to, at least,

01:16:11.260 is the continual transformation of character

01:16:13.580 and the quality of life attendant on that transformation

01:16:18.460 that is attendant upon that sacrificial upward journey.

01:16:23.940 Because you know that as you pursue the opportunities,

01:16:28.280 the difficult opportunities that make themselves manifest to you,

01:16:32.300 as adventure calls that, you put yourself together

01:16:36.760 and you forego the foolishness that marred your past

01:16:40.420 and that the consequence of that is that you're a benefit to yourself

01:16:45.100 and your reputation grows and you're more likely to establish something permanent

01:16:50.320 and you do that in a way that benefits everyone else.

01:16:52.800 And the better you get at that, the farther you are climbing,

01:16:56.580 you are up the ladder that leads to the heavens, right?

01:17:00.380 And there's no end to that.

01:17:01.640 And you could think of God in that sense not only as the voice of adventure,

01:17:05.600 let's say, that calls to Abraham and to you,

01:17:07.540 but also as the pinnacle of the ladder of character transformation

01:17:13.120 that recedes as you approach it, right?

01:17:16.460 And you want God, in a sense, to be ineffable,

01:17:19.200 so incomprehensible and undefinable and inexhaustible

01:17:22.260 because you don't want the adventure of your life in some ways to have a limit.

01:17:26.780 And so the promise is that no matter how good you get at what you're doing,

01:17:31.000 as a consequence of your pursuit of the redeeming adventure and your sacrifices,

01:17:35.540 is that no matter which mountain you climb

01:17:38.100 and no matter which mountain you reach the pinnacle of,

01:17:41.160 you'll see another mountain in the distance

01:17:42.760 that's a higher pinnacle that you could yet climb.

01:17:45.520 And there's no end to that.

01:17:46.640 And in a sense, that's harsh

01:17:49.380 because you can never achieve the final destination.

01:17:54.100 But on the other hand, well, do you want to?

01:17:57.560 I mean, maybe what you want in life

01:17:59.120 is an open-ended adventure

01:18:01.040 that improves as you pursue it without end.

01:18:03.720 and that's a good definition of, and a good classic definition in the deepest sense of

01:18:09.020 the kingdom of God or the garden of Eden or the paradise that's spread on earth that men

01:18:14.360 refuse to see that Christ makes reference to in the gospels. And so, well, so what's the story?

01:18:20.680 Well, the story is a representation of a pattern of attention and action that in the positive sense,

01:18:26.920 the comedic sense, transforms you upward. And what's the story? Well, it's a representation

01:18:32.460 of your aim. And then it's a representation of the sequential transformations of your aim as you get

01:18:39.940 better and better at aiming as your character develops and you mature. And that expands in a

01:18:44.960 way that enriches your life and enriches the life of other people and establishes something permanent

01:18:50.200 worth establishing and makes you a benefit to everyone else. And that's all allied with the

01:18:56.880 call within you that impels you to dance on the edge and challenge yourself. And that's also the

01:19:02.500 place, and this is a good way to end this, this is so cool. That's also the line between yin and

01:19:07.560 yang, let's say. That's the border between order and chaos that's maximally challenging. And that's

01:19:13.720 the place where the maximum meaning of life is experienced. And you know this because you know

01:19:19.980 that when you've challenged yourself properly and you're really on the edge, that you're not

01:19:24.300 self-conscious, and you're not lost in misery, and you're really in the game, and that there's

01:19:28.680 nothing better than that. And what that indicates, it's so cool, it indicates that the spirit of

01:19:34.020 adventure, the spirit that should be put in the highest place, the pinnacle of Jacob's ladder,

01:19:40.320 and the deepest responsible meaning of your life are all exactly the same thing. And that

01:19:46.900 phenomena, that unified phenomena, that's a reflection of the God in whose image you're

01:19:54.340 made. That's the message of at least a fragment of the biblical library, and that's the story

01:20:04.720 of your life, right?

01:20:16.900 So that's so fun, that story,

01:20:24.240 because it's ridiculously optimistic,

01:20:27.500 but it's also believable.

01:20:29.020 And things that are ridiculously optimistic and believable,

01:20:32.880 those are rare.

01:20:34.100 Those are very rare.

01:20:35.060 So if you come across something like that,

01:20:36.560 you think, oh, that's a good deal.

01:20:37.920 It's like, I couldn't ask for something better than that,

01:20:40.940 that the spirit adventure is that which unifies

01:20:44.480 the individual and society and the present and the future

01:20:47.740 and that imbues life with meaning, that's a great deal.

01:20:51.620 And so that's really worth thinking about, like practically,

01:20:53.960 because you think, well, what is it that's calling you to adventure?

01:20:56.880 Like, what are you afraid of pursuing but would love to if you only dared?

01:21:00.800 It's like, well, what have you got to lose?

01:21:03.320 You know, you're all in in the game anyways.

01:21:05.220 And so if you live your life to the fullest,

01:21:10.740 well, you could reconcile yourself to your fate.

01:21:13.200 and you can set the world right.

01:21:16.580 That's the promise.

01:21:17.500 And if we're adapted to the world,

01:21:19.720 even in the biological manner,

01:21:22.280 it seems to me that it can't be any other way.

01:21:25.060 Like, how could it be any other way

01:21:26.380 than the best possible way to live your life

01:21:28.740 would be to live it fully and to the utmost?

01:21:31.460 And why would you ever think

01:21:32.660 that you could put things together for yourself

01:21:35.160 or for the people around you without doing that?

01:21:37.300 And how else could it make itself manifest

01:21:39.480 than what calls you to be more than you are?

01:21:42.120 it's obvious in a fundamental sense

01:21:44.860 and I think everyone knows it

01:21:46.180 we don't know it explicitly enough

01:21:48.640 and well that's part of the reason that I wrote this book

01:21:50.780 and I'm doing these lectures

01:21:51.840 is to try to make that more explicit

01:21:53.480 because it's such a ridiculously fun thing to understand

01:21:56.660 and so thank you for listening

01:21:58.240 and we'll welcome

01:21:59.440 applause

01:22:01.440 applause

01:22:04.440 applause

01:22:06.440 applause

01:22:08.440 applause

01:22:10.440 We'll welcome Jonathan and Tammy back on stage,

01:22:15.580 and then Jonathan's going to make some comments on what I talked about,

01:22:19.600 and then we're going to answer some questions.

01:22:21.500 And so that's what's going to happen.

01:22:37.540 All right, so I get to react to what Jordan said.

01:22:39.800 that's a lot that's a lot so while he was talking I was I was like I was trying to think like are

01:22:47.540 there the most practical examples that I can find of some of the things that you're talking about

01:22:52.680 and then I remembered that if if if my memory serves me correct tomorrow is the beginning of

01:23:00.180 the NBA finale here in Boston, right?

01:23:07.920 Which is interesting because I don't think anybody here is actually playing, right?

01:23:13.600 So where does that joy come from, right?

01:23:17.480 Where does that cheer come from, right?

01:23:20.100 There's a sense in which what Jordan is talking about, this capacity for certain people to

01:23:27.540 reach a level of excellence in the name of a community. And that becomes a model and something

01:23:35.880 that unites you, that unites us together into this vision of excellence. And even because the

01:23:42.620 sport is also this beautiful image of people coming together and collaborating and accomplishing

01:23:47.480 something together. So it becomes this model for us and it participates in your identity, right?

01:23:54.400 If they win the finale, you'll be proud.

01:23:58.440 What a strange thing.

01:24:00.680 But that happens all through our society, right?

01:24:04.320 It's the same reason why we're proud of certain figures that represent our nation,

01:24:08.940 that we're proud of people in history that represent the ideals that we are looking towards.

01:24:17.040 And then we give like our junior highs names like Martin Luther King, junior high or whatever,

01:24:22.400 because we can see in that name and that identity a model

01:24:26.180 and a manner of that brings us together.

01:24:29.220 But what's amazing about that,

01:24:30.720 and it was really in the things we were saying,

01:24:33.180 is that all of us can play that role

01:24:36.840 because the way that you cheer

01:24:39.900 and you're proud of the Boston Celtics when they win

01:24:43.240 is the same way that your child is amazed

01:24:46.320 and proud of you as a dad or as a mom

01:24:48.660 when they see you as a model,

01:24:50.040 that they can rejoice in and participate in

01:24:53.600 and become one in two.

01:24:55.200 And so you can kind of see it happening

01:24:56.560 at all these levels.

01:25:10.160 Her of the death.

01:25:15.840 I want to say one last thing about,

01:25:17.540 because there was this image that came to me

01:25:18.880 also while Jordan was talking.

01:25:20.040 There's a verse in Revelation 2 where Christ says to those who are victorious,

01:25:27.580 it will be given to receive the secret manna, right?

01:25:31.340 The secret manna, the bread from heaven.

01:25:33.520 Right.

01:25:34.020 And they will receive a stone with a new name, right?

01:25:37.760 A name that only they will know.

01:25:40.040 And so this idea of like, this idea of being victorious and moving towards,

01:25:44.100 you know, through sacrifice, through victory,

01:25:46.460 that it reveals to you this new identity that you can participate in right well the stone is a good

01:25:52.640 image for what an identity of relative permanence as well yeah right i mean that's why we memorialize

01:25:59.160 the dead with stone and so what that would mean what that implies is that the more spiritual food

01:26:05.780 you feast on so to speak so the more your aim is upward and the more you partake in that the more

01:26:11.400 rock solid your identity and revolutionary weird that's a weird thing it's rock solid and

01:26:16.600 revolutionary at the same time because you change so much you need a new name but that name is now

01:26:22.380 a rock it's something that's increasingly solid and that's also why christ is a cornerstone right

01:26:27.200 that's a that's a symbolic image of of christ as the cornerstone of the of the heavenly building

01:26:32.600 let's say right and that that has to do so you might ask what does that mean because it's it's

01:26:38.760 very abstract concept, but it means something like the voluntary self-sacrifice is the cornerstone

01:26:45.840 of the community. It means something like that. And you know that if you're a parent, because

01:26:49.960 you're partaking in that. Like if you're a mother, mothers make, well, the most obvious sacrifice

01:26:57.040 merely in the act of becoming a mother. It's a sacrificial act. And it's obviously a sacrificial 0.97

01:27:04.400 act on which life itself depends, that's also why cultures that don't hold the mother and infant

01:27:11.060 image as sacred, they just disappear. It's a sacrificial mode of being. And so sacrifice is 0.66

01:27:18.080 the cornerstone of the community, and Christ is a figure that represents the ultimate sacrifice.

01:27:23.160 And that stone that becomes your identity is a cornerstone of the community. And that might

01:27:30.520 change you so radically that you need a new name. Right, right.

01:27:43.380 Can a genuine scientific endeavor that wrestles with God eventually lead to a truthful synthesis

01:27:51.580 of religion and science? Well, I think it has been in some ways leading to that.

01:28:00.520 I think that any true commitment to the truth,

01:28:06.100 I don't think there is anything different between a true commitment to the truth

01:28:10.720 and the way and the life, right?

01:28:12.880 That's Christ's proclamation in the Gospels.

01:28:17.340 See, it's partly because a true commitment to the truth is a sacrificial commitment.

01:28:21.460 You know this if you're a scientist,

01:28:23.320 because I could always tell as a researcher when I found something in my data that was true

01:28:29.260 because I didn't want it to be true, and so I had to give up something, and that might have

01:28:34.120 been a pet belief, for example. I mean, if all you find in your dad is the things that you wished

01:28:38.780 were there, no, that's not good. You want to find something that surprises you and shocks you out of

01:28:46.360 your complacence and forces you to re-evaluate your a priori commitments, and that's a sacrificial

01:28:52.880 process, right? And, you know, we think in our society, because we're not very bright, that

01:28:58.080 there's an antithesis between the scientific endeavor and the religious endeavor, and

01:29:03.000 that's not true historically. I mean, the first thing we might note is that the universities

01:29:07.660 where the truth-seeking institutions were, and they grew out of the tradition of the monasteries,

01:29:19.640 right? I mean, the intellectual commitment of the West to truth, and this includes scientific

01:29:25.740 truth was grounded in the judeo-christian notion that the world as such was comprehensible that

01:29:32.880 that comprehensible order was good that investigating that order would improve the

01:29:38.880 world and that human beings could participate in that that's all the faith pre-commitments

01:29:44.020 that scientists make before they even start their their their adventure let's say and i don't see

01:29:50.500 anything in that at all that's going to conflict in the final analysis with a proper mode of

01:29:57.140 existence and an understanding of religious stories. And I can see now in many disciplines,

01:30:04.060 like there's certainly a convergence of belief in many disciplines toward a more, toward a view of

01:30:12.000 the world that's much more, I wouldn't say sympathetic to, but in alignment with certain

01:30:19.040 forms of religious conceptualization. I mean, one of the people we talk to all the time, John

01:30:23.960 Verveke, who's on the cutting edge of cognitive neuroscience, he certainly outlines this in great

01:30:29.520 detail. And the greatest neuroscientists that I know and have had the privilege to talk to

01:30:34.920 are increasingly conceptualizing the world from a biological perspective that's much more in keeping

01:30:42.360 with the vision, let's say, that I outlined to you tonight than would have been the case

01:30:46.800 30 years ago. So, no, there's no fundamental, this is a monotheistic claim, I suppose,

01:30:53.300 there's no fundamental contradiction possible between different ways of validly pursuing the

01:30:59.240 truth. They all converge on the same end, which would be some representation of the ultimate

01:31:05.620 integrating unity of things. Why would we bother with the scientific enterprise if that wasn't the

01:31:10.700 case, right? We believe that, we believe most deeply, this is why science emerged out of alchemy,

01:31:16.120 The alchemists believed that if we investigated the material world deeply enough

01:31:20.200 and with the proper ethical commitment,

01:31:22.220 that we could find a material substance that would make everyone rich

01:31:25.500 and make everyone healthy and make everyone wealthy.

01:31:29.000 That's the dream of alchemy.

01:31:30.960 And science emerged out of that from the motivational perspective.

01:31:33.940 And the scientific dream is that if we analyze the material world,

01:31:36.880 we'll come to the kind of understanding that will help us thrive in the world.

01:31:40.980 And so we will find, as things converge,

01:31:45.540 that there's no difference between those claims

01:31:47.860 and the claims that are made at the deepest level

01:31:49.900 of the religious enterprise.

01:31:54.860 We have to stop thinking of the religious enterprise

01:32:02.340 as superstitious science.

01:32:04.900 That isn't what it is. 0.97

01:32:06.620 That's foolish anthropology of religion. 0.89

01:32:09.120 how long is too long to date someone before you get married oh that that's easy that's easy to 0.83

01:32:22.300 answer what if you're sure at first what's that what if you're sure at first and doubts come after

01:32:28.580 months or years that's called life so the first thing you could do is just ask the woman in the

01:32:38.020 relationship because she'll know and and then the doubt thing is like well

01:32:44.360 who who goes through their life even for a day without at least for a moment doubting

01:32:55.240 everything that they think and say and do right I mean even in a in an extraordinarily well put

01:33:03.380 together marriage there's going to be periods of extreme doubt not least and that's almost

01:33:09.240 independent of the quality of the marriage because one of the problems of being married is that you're

01:33:13.720 in the same boat and now and then the boat you're in is in very very stormy seas and even if you're

01:33:20.220 both rowing like mad that doesn't mean that you're not in danger of capsizing and so you can't be

01:33:25.920 married to someone or in a relationship without doubt because you're going to encounter the things

01:33:30.780 in life that would make anyone doubtful together and now you know if you've constituted your

01:33:37.160 marriage properly and the vows are real then you can rely on another person to do their best while

01:33:42.600 they're rowing and to do that you know locked arm and arm and you and that's a great advantage

01:33:46.840 but the idea that you need to be free of doubt before you commit it's like

01:33:52.120 that will never happen to you ever in your whole life about anything so just you just give that up

01:33:57.640 there's there's one other thing there's one other thing that you have to understand too

01:34:06.040 so we know for example that people who live together are more likely to get divorced after

01:34:10.720 they get married than people who didn't live together now this is kind of counterintuitive

01:34:14.860 in a way because you kind of think well you know why don't we try each other out now the problem

01:34:19.900 with that hypothesis is that you don't get to try other people out they're not commodities it's not

01:34:25.480 used car market. But there's something deeper than that, which is the person you're going out

01:34:30.640 with is not the same person that you'll be married to. Because when you get married,

01:34:35.100 the relationship changes, and you don't know what that change will be until you get married.

01:34:39.820 And so you can't practice it, because the relationship you have before you're married

01:34:44.920 is tentative. And it's also, there's also, especially if it's been going on for a long

01:34:49.980 time. There's a kind of lie in it. Because when you're living with someone, the underlying

01:34:57.040 covenant is, you'll do until someone better comes along. Right? Because if that wasn't the

01:35:02.980 underlying agreement, then why wouldn't you be married? And then you might ask, well, how the

01:35:07.160 hell can you have a relationship of quality when the presupposition is, well, you're all right, 0.98

01:35:12.180 but, you know, maybe I could find someone more foolish and more desirable who would like me 0.95

01:35:17.780 better and I'd like to reserve that right. Well, the other person is going to trust you if that's 0.90

01:35:23.000 your attitude. And if they don't trust you, you're not going to see the best of them and you're not

01:35:27.440 going to know who they are. And so you can't practice. There's lots of things in life that

01:35:33.880 you can't practice. You have to throw yourself into them. And, you know, you try to do that with

01:35:39.200 your eyes open and with a certain amount of gratitude and good faith. But don't be thinking

01:35:45.360 that you're ever going to get there in the absence of doubt.

01:35:48.540 You do.

01:35:49.160 You get married in large part despite doubt,

01:35:53.000 just like you take a new job despite doubt or do anything. 0.99

01:35:56.700 You know, you have to be a fool to start a new business, 0.99

01:35:59.820 actuarially speaking. 0.99

01:36:01.680 You know, first of all, most entrepreneurs have sequences of failures

01:36:05.100 before they have a success,

01:36:07.120 and most small businesses fail in the first three or four years.

01:36:10.840 So if you had any sense, you'd just look at the data and think,

01:36:13.740 I'm not doing that.

01:36:15.360 But that's a foolish thing to conclude because failure is often a precondition to later success.

01:36:22.300 And you learn through, partly because you learn through failure.

01:36:27.820 And that means you have to, in part, that means you have to throw yourself into something before you can evaluate it.

01:36:34.120 And the marriage bond, even the ceremony, is an expression of that faith.

01:36:39.760 It's something like, and I remember, you know, our vows.

01:36:42.440 You know, when I said I do to Tammy and vice versa, we meant it.

01:36:47.600 It was like, we're in this, no matter what. 0.99

01:36:51.960 And that's, God, if you don't think there's doubt in that, you're crazy. 0.76

01:37:01.320 It's so heartening to have someone bet on you, right?

01:37:08.060 I mean, it stiffens your spine because you think, oh my God,

01:37:10.660 this person is, like, they've committed their life to me.

01:37:13.560 That's a real indication of faith.

01:37:15.840 Maybe there's more to me than I thought, right?

01:37:18.520 Well, really, that's the favor you're doing,

01:37:20.320 the person that you married, you know?

01:37:23.160 And that's a hell of a, that's a real sacrificial gesture.

01:37:26.580 And you don't get that any other way

01:37:28.600 than with that commitment.

01:37:29.720 It has to be, the commitment has to be there

01:37:31.500 for that to be a reality.

01:37:34.300 Okay.

01:37:40.660 Okay, Jonathan.

01:37:44.360 How would you approach bringing God to people who have little or no faith

01:37:49.380 or those who don't even question the existential?

01:38:00.000 It's weird because some people might look at what I do

01:38:03.860 and think that I'm trying to bring God to people.

01:38:06.280 and trying to, and I really, that's not the way that I approach things.

01:38:11.880 You know, I think that there's great meaning in the religious texts.

01:38:16.820 I think that there's great joy in religious participation.

01:38:20.440 And that, I think, is the best way to do it, right,

01:38:23.440 is in some ways to show people or to help people see the beauty,

01:38:27.880 the power, the joy that is part of that life.

01:38:32.640 And I rarely try to convince people of anything

01:38:35.940 because i don't see how that helps yeah no it's an invitation right well so one of the things you

01:38:42.980 see for example in this exodus story is that the temptation of moses who's a leader he's the

01:38:49.660 archetypal leader he's the person who archetypally leads his people from slavery so that's subjugation

01:38:58.260 to tyranny in any form he leads them out of that through the desert of doubt to the promised land

01:39:03.880 every leader always does that. That's what defines leadership. And Moses' proclivity,

01:39:09.640 his temptation is to use force. And he's punished brutally for that. He doesn't get to enter the

01:39:15.560 promised land because of that. It's like, there's to be no compulsion in religious matters.

01:39:21.080 And it's because the proper mode of presentation of the religious mode of being is an invitation.

01:39:27.280 That's the invitation to the heavenly banquet. It's like, well, why the hell wouldn't you want

01:39:30.980 to eat manna. Right? I mean, that's the offer that's on the table, is that that's the well

01:39:37.540 that never runs dry, and that the water that eternally replenishes, and the food that's

01:39:44.320 served in the highest possible place. Well, you invite people to, you don't have to force people

01:39:49.060 to do that. If they understand what's on offer, they're going to be stampeding to it. And if

01:39:53.740 they're not, then you've made the offer wrong. And so, you don't convince or force that. Why would

01:40:00.400 you. If you're offering what's best to people, you don't need to use force. It just shows like

01:40:07.720 this is this. I've been thinking about this. There's something very interesting that happens

01:40:12.660 in the Exodus story. When the Israelites leave Egypt, they take the treasure of the Egyptians.

01:40:20.220 They despoil the Egyptians. I've been trying to figure that out. And I think partly what it means 0.99

01:40:24.960 is that when a society becomes tyrannical,

01:40:28.520 it forgets what the true treasures are.

01:40:33.840 And then you can just run off with them.

01:40:37.620 And I think that's really what's happening with the universities, for example,

01:40:41.260 is that the universities have decided that the true, the beautiful, and the good

01:40:45.440 are arbitrary social constructions,

01:40:48.100 and so they've left them on the table.

01:40:50.080 And you can just run off with those, because they're treasures.

01:40:53.580 And if people are too blind or resentful to see that,

01:40:58.600 that doesn't mean the treasures aren't there.

01:41:00.560 And it's the same thing with the religious enterprise,

01:41:03.160 is that the goal of the job of people who are engaged in the religious enterprise

01:41:07.440 is just to pull back the veil and show the treasure.

01:41:11.200 And the people who are capable of seeing will see and move forward.

01:41:16.320 And the people who would reject even the heavenly treasure to spite God,

01:41:21.660 they'll just continue doing exactly that.

01:41:24.520 And that's how the sheep separate themselves from the goats

01:41:28.040 and the wheat from the chaff.

01:41:30.280 And you don't need force for that.

01:41:32.420 Quite the contrary.

01:41:34.460 No, you're with the goats if you're using force and not invitation.

01:41:48.520 So...

01:41:49.040 One more?

01:41:49.780 What advice would you have for someone going into a career in academia

01:41:56.960 as someone who doesn't align with the current ideologies being pushed in universities?

01:42:13.080 Well, there's absolutely no point in pursuing an academic career

01:42:19.720 if you're not pursuing the treasures that are part of that.

01:42:24.440 Like, you want to pursue the good and the beautiful and the true.

01:42:28.980 Now, the advantage to being an academic in principle

01:42:33.080 is that you have a secure and reasonable salary.

01:42:38.440 Now, the disadvantage is that all you have on the salary side

01:42:42.920 is a secure and reasonable salary.

01:42:44.960 So you have to forego.

01:42:46.320 this makes academics resentful say of business people because a business person who's successful

01:42:53.400 can have an immense financial return and there's really a cap on that in some ways in the academic

01:42:59.700 realm but you can have enough and so why would you be satisfied with that enough and the answer is

01:43:06.600 well if you have with that security the opportunity to mentor young people who want to develop which

01:43:13.640 is a great pleasure, and you have the opportunity to pursue ideas and to investigate the truth,

01:43:19.400 that's a really good deal. 0.99

01:43:21.640 But if you can't do that, well, then it's a stupid deal. 0.99

01:43:25.060 And so I would say, if you're going into academia, understand that the reason to go 0.98

01:43:29.560 in there is to pursue the good and the beautiful and the true, and you should try to do that.

01:43:34.440 And if you can't do that because all the other academics and administrators get in

01:43:38.280 your way, then you should go find something else to do.

01:43:40.240 because wherever the university is, it's no longer there.

01:43:47.980 The university isn't Harvard Yard.

01:43:50.840 It's not the Harvard Endowment.

01:43:52.800 The university could disappear entirely from all of that,

01:43:55.320 and maybe already has.

01:43:56.620 I hope not, because it was a great place,

01:44:00.340 and maybe it could be a great place again.

01:44:03.760 I wouldn't say that it's a great place at the moment,

01:44:06.320 although there are people who are working hard to reverse that,

01:44:09.880 and more power to them, but just so when you go into academia, be an academic, pursue the truth,

01:44:18.620 say what you believe to be the case, and take your chances, and like, if you do that, and you do that

01:44:26.780 rigorously, you will be successful, although it might not be in the way that you think, and it

01:44:31.380 might not be the way that would have constituted an ordinary academic career 20 years ago. Like,

01:44:39.220 you can fail in a tyranny. You can fail upward. In fact, that's the only way to actually move

01:44:47.500 upward in a tyranny is to fail in the tyranny, right? Because a tyranny is defined by the grip

01:44:53.680 of the downward transformation. And so if you go into the university and you say what you believe

01:44:59.740 to be true, and you're honestly aiming upward, and that gets you in trouble, you may not be able

01:45:05.440 to see it, but that trouble is actually a form of success. And if you stick with that, you'll find

01:45:11.440 your way. That doesn't mean it'll be easy. It doesn't matter. Like, your life isn't going to

01:45:15.420 be easy. Forget that. Everyone. It's like, life is not easy. It's the voluntary hoisting of the

01:45:21.320 cross, right? So, you know, the reason I love being a university professor, especially on the teaching

01:45:34.260 side, but it was also true with research, because I did love it. I figured I'd be a university

01:45:39.060 professor until I was like 100, and it was because I got to tell young people what I truly believed

01:45:47.380 was the truth, and that was great, and then the research was an attempt to further that

01:45:51.900 understanding, and that's ridiculously interesting and adventurous, and so go into academia and try

01:45:58.620 to do that. And if you can't, well, find another place to work. And if you can't do that, then

01:46:04.520 teach online. Like, if you have valid knowledge, there's a market for it. And it might be real

01:46:10.580 useful for you to have to figure out where that market is. You know, it's not like people aren't

01:46:15.380 screaming out for education. I mean, look, how many people are there in this hall? There's 4,000

01:46:20.220 people in here. So, and there wasn't, there wasn't anything particularly easy about tonight's

01:46:27.560 lecture and it wasn't light entertainment

01:46:29.580 it was the sort of thing

01:46:31.680 that every academic dreams

01:46:33.520 of being able to do at the university

01:46:34.860 so this is the university

01:46:36.700 so find it

01:46:39.220 alright everyone

01:46:48.760 thank you very much for coming tonight

01:46:51.100 it was a pleasure being in Boston

01:46:52.600 yep

01:46:53.540 thank you everyone

01:46:56.320 thank you dear my question

01:47:00.200 thanks

01:47:02.800 good to see you all

01:47:10.900 thanks everybody

01:47:15.000 thanks for coming

01:47:15.960 who answers America's call

01:47:21.020 for more energy

01:47:21.900 our people do

01:47:24.640 Chevron's U.S. energy production has increased by nearly 60% in the past three years.

01:47:30.100 Hi, my name is Aaron, and I'm a WealthSight representative at Chevron.

01:47:33.520 I'm proud of the work that I do every day.

01:47:35.800 It gets more American oil out of the ground, and it brings America more energy security.

01:47:40.420 Learn more about what our people do at chevron.com slash America.

01:47:48.320 There are a few things I love more than good ranchers, but there are not many.

01:47:52.820 I'll tell you that.

01:47:53.620 I think it might make it on the top five of all things in the world.

01:47:58.840 It's just the best quality meat at the very best price from the very best people.

01:48:04.520 Meanwhile, you go to the grocery store.

01:48:06.280 You ever ask yourself, hey, where was this meat raised?

01:48:08.920 Because American beef on the package does not necessarily mean everything that that company sells is American.

01:48:13.860 Good Ranchers makes it very simple.

01:48:15.620 Every cut they sell is labeled, born, raised, and harvested in the USA.

01:48:21.560 They partner with more than 100 local American farms and ranchers

01:48:24.200 to deliver 100% American meat straight to your door.

01:48:27.240 Beef, chicken, pork, even seafood.

01:48:29.660 You know what you are feeding your family.

01:48:31.300 You know where it came from.

01:48:32.580 You're supporting American farmers and ranchers producing it.

01:48:35.400 And I love supporting Americans, and I love a good price.

01:48:39.220 For me, though, it all comes down to the quality.

01:48:41.640 The good rancher's quality is just next level on certainly all the beef.

01:48:46.360 Even, I'm not a huge chicken guy.

01:48:47.920 The chicken is like the best chicken you're going to get,

01:48:49.880 whether we're talking about the chicken breasts, whether we're talking about the

01:48:52.400 C2L-free chicken nuggets, it's all just magnificent. The people are great too.

01:48:56.000 Start a plan at goodranchers.com slash wire. Get 50 bucks off plus free meat with every order. You

01:49:00.700 can build your own box starting as low as under 29 bucks. That's goodranchers.com slash wire.

01:49:05.680 50 bucks off plus free meat with every order. Goodranchers.com slash wire. Goodranchers.com

01:49:10.980 American meat delivered. My teammate says he plays pickup basketball, quote,

01:49:16.260 for the cardio.

01:49:18.060 Well, there's more to it than that, Sean.

01:49:21.600 Like with Bet365,

01:49:22.900 I get paid the second my team goes up big

01:49:24.760 with early payout

01:49:25.560 and can cash out at any time

01:49:26.980 before the game ends.

01:49:28.420 Sean's getting his steps,

01:49:29.680 but I'm getting paid.

01:49:31.880 Bet365, the home of winning early.

01:49:34.280 Must be 19 and older, Ontario only.

01:49:35.980 Please play responsibly.

01:49:36.880 If you or someone you know

01:49:37.620 has concerns about gambling,

01:49:38.640 visit ConnexOntario.ca

01:49:39.880 or call 1-866-531-2600.

01:49:42.440 Terms and conditions apply.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - October 25, 2026

Why Your Marriage Feels Like A Prison Instead Of An Adventure

Episode Stats

Transcript