Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 681: Darryl Cooper

Episode Date: April 13, 2025

Darryl Cooper, new friend of the show and host of the greatest podcast out there, joins the DTFH! Check out Darryl's amazing show, The Martyr Made Podcast, available everywhere you listen to podcasts! Denver family! April 19 - Come see Duncan at the Portal Bicycle Day Late Night Takeover at Meow Wolf. Celebrate the first ever trip by joining Duncan's Simulator Upgrade Workshop! This episode is brought to you by: Upgrade your closet this year without the upgraded price tag. Go to Quince.com/Duncan for 365-day returns, plus free shipping on your order! Check Out Squarespace.com for a free trial, and when you’re ready to launch, Squarespace.com/DUNCAN to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Start your free online visit today at Hims.com/DUNCAN for your personalized hair loss treatment options!

Hello friends, I'm so excited for you to watch today's episode or listen to it today's guest Darryl Cooper has the greatest podcast out there Martyr made it's so good and he happened to be in Austin and he stopped by the studio Holy shit. What a conversation But before we jump into it real quick come celebrate celebrate Bicycle Day with yours truly. I'm gonna be at Meow Wolf on April 19th. We're taking over Meow Wolf in Denver. Check out, what's this website?

Youaretheportal.com. Come, it's gonna be so fun. I'm not doing stand-up, I've got a very special treat for you. I'm not gonna give any of it away. You can find everything out about this event by going to youaretheportal.com. I'm not the only person who's going to be there. LP Globby will be there and Reggie Watts. It's going to be awesome, so please come. Also, see me April 24th at the Capitol Hill Comedy Bar in Seattle.

Come out, see some live comedy, and now everybody, get ready. You're about to get your socks knocked off. I stumbled upon the Martyr Made podcast some months ago. As it turns out, by some divine intercession, Darryl Cooper, the host, actually has listened to my podcast, is familiar with me, and happens to be friends with Daniele Bollelli anyway. The long and short of it is we've become friends, and he was kind enough to come and hang out with me. And wow, this is an awesome episode.

If you're looking for a good historical podcast with incredible stories that is riveting, just check out Martyr Made. If you wanna really freak yourself out, look at his Epstein series. It's incredible. He's got an incredible series on Jonestown and many, many more.

It's the Martyr Made podcast. But now everybody welcome to the DTFH, Darrell Cooper. Darrell, welcome to the DTFH. Yeah, it's really cool to be here, man. I've been a fan for so long, it's weird to be here. When you told me that, it blew my mind because, you know, every once in a while you get lucky. The algorithm spins something up for you. I don't even know how I've stumbled upon your podcast.

I'd heard about it. And what's really funny is I thought my brother-in-law told me about it. And then after I listened to a few episodes of your podcast, I was like, dude, thanks for recommending that podcast. And he's like, I didn't recommend it. So I have no idea who recommended it. But somehow, just God was with me and I landed on your podcast. And it has kept me more riveted than anything and as long as

I can remember, man. So I am just so excited to get a chance to hang out with you and talk. Martyr Made Podcast, check it out. You've already heard me ramble about it. So I want to dive right in. And I haven't listened to every episode of your podcast. I will eventually, but I've gathered something about you from it and in conversations we've had at dinner. So I thought we could start

this podcast off and hopefully most of you are familiar with Daryl's podcast, but we'll get into it anyway. This is my favorite Mark Twain quote, but who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most, our one fellow and brother, who most needed a friend yet had not a single one, the one sinner among us, all who had the highest and clearest right to every Christian's daily and nightly prayers, for the plain and unassailable reason that His was the first and greatest need, He being among sinners, the supremest, Mark Twain. And that's what I get from many episodes of your podcast.

And this is why you are a controversial figure, is because you look into the past, you look into history, and you tell these stories where people we have just taken for granted as bad guys, deserving of the horrors that they encountered because of what they did, where suddenly you humanize them. Suddenly you force an unexpected compassion out of us for things you're not supposed to feel compassion for. And my first question is, when did you become a servant of the Dark Lord? I think probably it goes back to when I was a kid, honestly. I grew up in, like we were poor growing up.

I grew up in the ghettos of West Coast big cities for the most part, moving around all the time. I went to 35 different public schools over 12 years, moving every few months. Military family. Nah, just single mom and we were living where we could, you know, from time to time. And we get farmed out to relatives,

like if things got a little rough at home at various points. And so growing up in that environment, you know, I knew a lot of people, some of them very close to me, friends, even relatives, great people. They were no less moral than I was, no stupider than I was, just across the board, they're great people. And a good number of them, they didn't make it out. Like I made it out of that situation. A lot of them ended up in the gutter, you know, or somewhere worse. And I really like very early on sort of recognized that

that it was really largely a matter of luck that I didn't end up like them and they didn't end up like me. that it was really largely a matter of luck that I didn't end up like them and they didn't end up like me. The fact that I had a wrestling coach who happened to take an interest at me at this critical juncture where I really could have gone one of two directions

or another situation where I get into a street fight and really get carried away and the cops show up and they just let me go and they might not have my Skin tone was a little darker or if he had gotten up on the wrong side of the bed that morning whatever and then my life Goes off in a totally different direction, right? So, you know when I was young in my early 20s in the military I was still getting in fights with like Tijuana police, you know and like having to pay them off So they didn't keep us in a Mexican jail. Jesus Christ.

And so I think about all those kind of things where it was just purely a matter of luck that my life wasn't completely derailed. And then who knows how I respond to that. Maybe I dose myself or I self-just, there's all the things that people do to deal with like their life not going the way that they hoped or expected. And so just kind of recognizing that there but for the grace of God go on. It really instilled in me, it's still natural to me to judge everybody else. Like that's natural to all of us. But it really instilled in me like a commitment to try not to judge people too harshly who are

confronted with circumstances that I know nothing about. I couldn't imagine being in having to make choices I couldn't imagine having to make and and really just trying to understand that like these are you know these are real people who were put in extraordinary situations and you know humans are capable of oh I mean we can be the Aztecs we can be you know Thomas Aquinas whatever like we have a wide range of outcomes that humans can can arrive at if we Are left to our own devices and so There's just I guess like I just I try to be humble when I approach other people including and maybe especially I love the way

he frames that quote because like I would say, I think, that, you know, I posted on Twitter today that people don't like it, or they get annoyed when you don't like what they like, but they really get angry if you don't hate what they hate. And you're supposed to hate Satan, obviously, it's the epitome of evil, all these kind of things. But I think that it's probably the highest achievement of a Christian's development, to be able to recognize and sincerely pray for Satan.

You know what I mean? Absolutely. I mean, what if not that, what was Jesus doing as he was carrying his cross and saying, forgive them, they know not what they do. Yeah. And... Thomas Wolfe, look homeward, angel. Only later do you realize what angel he's talking to.

But yeah, absolutely. Like, if there isn't that level of compassion in a person, then there really is no hope for the world, for redemption in the world, right? Like if we can't look beyond a person's whatever it may be, if there's some limit to us, to our ability to see through, you know, I just got an unexpected cavity and I was in the, I can't express that level of pain. And I can't, I don't, the love I feel for my children is like a billion suns. But when that, when the waves of pain were hitting, they could say anything to me.

And it was just anger, annoyance. And so when you look at a person who's being an asshole, whether just a run-of-the-mill asshole or like global level asshole, I think it's a pretty safe bet. They don't feel that good. They're probably in a lot of pain, you know? And if we can't find a way to see that,

to understand underneath all that, it's a baby. It's a cute baby. You ever seen baby pictures of Hitler? He was a cutie. And if you were pushing Hitler through the airport in his stroller, everybody, like, look at that little darling, little love. Right? And that's underneath it all, under the meth, under the fucking stupid mustache. That's still there, I think. I think. Now, this is the primary thing I wanted to talk to you about.

So what? It's fucking Hitler. So what? It's Jeffrey Dahmer. I don't fucking care if Jeffrey Dahmer has some cute pictures of himself as a baby at the goddamn mall. Why should I spend any time thinking in any way that redeems that person when they've caused so much suffering? Because you're redeeming yourself when you do that. Ah, yes. It redeems that person when they've caused so much suffering. You're redeeming yourself when you do that.

Ah, yes. That's really what it comes down to. It's not about whether the other person deserves your compassion or not. Right. It's just better for you to be compassionate. And I think that when you stretch yourself to try to understand people as human beings who at first glance are incomprehensible to you, you're doing a lot of good for yourself. And I don't mean that necessarily in a selfish way. There's an aspect of that to it. But that's the way that you redeem the world. You start with yourself and work outward. The idea that, you know, I think it's a mark of excessive pride to think that

it's somehow our responsibility to come up with how we're going to fix society, fix the world and like something we're going to do. Like, you know who George Price is? Yeah. Yeah. So I love George Price's story. It's such a, I talked about him in the episode I did about Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. He's this guy, you know, scientist, worked on the Manhattan Project, brilliant guy. You know, if you're like a mathematician or physicist back in the 40s working on the Manhattan Project, it's like you're at the top of the game, right, with the best people, the smartest, most amazing people. And so the war ends, and he goes and he works at one of the big giant corporations at a desk

doing a sort of job. But it's not very fulfilling. It doesn't really reach the, you know, allow him to express his ambitions the way that he would, especially coming down off the high of working on the Manhattan Project. And so he ends up getting married, has two daughters, and eventually has this sort of life crisis

where he decides to divorce his wife, leave his two daughters behind in America. And he goes off to England to, he wants to work at, I think, the Galton Center at the London School of Economics or something like that. And so he goes over there and he does really important work on evolutionary biology and like specifically on altruism and how he was one of the fathers of the idea of like collective

altruism, the idea that our genes can tell us to be kind or even sacrificial to benefit others who broadly share our genes. But then what he did was he had like, he had a real kind of spiritual crisis because this is really interesting because this is a guy who had left his kids behind and abandoned them basically. And he becomes obsessed with how it is that people can act selflessly toward others

who share their genes. So obviously it's like something going on there. And he becomes really, like he convinces himself. Like this was a man who, and I admire this even when it goes in bad directions, and even when it leads to really ugly outcomes. People who become convinced of something, and they're like, okay, I have to change my whole life

because if this is true, I'm not going to know this is true and just sort of keep going. No, I'm going to, this is gonna affect the way I live my life and approach the world. And he was one of those guys, total commitment. And so he kind of devoted himself to proving, because he had convinced himself that his, any, when he sent a birthday present to his daughter,

or whatever, that that was just the genes. It was just the genes acting. And it wasn't actually an act of kindness. That's kind of what we call it, but it really was just him. And he couldn't accept it, but he believed it. He's like, I've mathematically proven this, and I'm a rational scientist, so I'm not going to deny it. I do believe it, but I can't accept it.

And so I'm going to prove in my own life that, or disprove this in my own life. And so he ends up, he starts off by going down and just giving his paycheck away to like the drunks and homeless people under the bridges in London, right? Just giving everything away. He gets to the point where it's the middle of winter,

he's giving his shoes away, he's giving his jacket away. He opens up his apartment and people can just come and go. Like, he has no possessions. Everything is theirs and his, it's all just completely pouring himself out, emptying himself completely, you know, for these other people. We live like that long enough, obviously.

It's gonna take its toll on you too. And he ends up on the street mentally unwell, you know, in all this. And there comes a point where all the people, because you gotta imagine, like, if this is happening, like on one level, you hear that and you're like, man, this is almost like a saint, right? This is almost like a person, like these are the people you read about in the ancient text.

But if that was your brother, you'd be like, what has happened to my brother? Right. And you would grieve over it, you know? And so that's what the people around him, the people who knew him and admired him, were doing. They were grieving over what had happened to this person who's living on the street and he's mentally unwell and can't take care of himself. And so they finally are able to sort of get through to him for a second and he ends up going and getting a job as like a janitor at a bank and he gets an apartment again. He's kind

of got it together. But then one day, and this too was like not an act of, well I would say it was an act of desperation, but it wasn't something too was like not an act of, well I would say it was an act of desperation, but it wasn't something that was just born out of pure impulsive, depression-driven impulse or something. It was part of his intellectual journey. He decided to do the ultimate thing to prove that people can't, they don't have to act in accordance with their genes demands. And he stood in front of his bathroom mirror and had a little set of like nail scissors and he poked it

into his neck and he just snipped his carotid artery as he looked himself in the eye in the mirror and he died and at his uh that's the most fucked up thing I've ever heard man yeah and so so okay so that's where it lead that's where that led and we hear it we're like that's the worst thing I've ever heard you say well What would have been the right thing? for him to do knife Knife are you fucking kidding me? Well, I think for his purposes it was much more like you could put it in there and look at yourself and be like let's do

I can do with a knife Yeah, I suppose see if one of us if he talked to one of these so-called friends, they would've been like, dude, knife, nail clippers? If you tried clipping a nail, Well, no, it was like some nail scissors of some kind as far as I know. Okay, fine, nail scissors works. I'm picturing like toenail clippers.

Go ahead. It's like, damn it, I didn't get it. Try it again. Oh, shit. Hey, can you come hold the flashlight for me? But like, you know, you see that, and that's such a tragic, terrible story, damn it, I didn't get it. I tried again. Oh, shit. Hey, can you come hold the flashlight for me? But like, you know, you see it, and that gets such a tragic, terrible story, you know, that it ended up where it did.

Even though, and I say this guardedly maybe, but even to the very end in his final act, there's a part of me that admires him, you know, to a degree. Even though it was like, I think by that point, coming out of just a lot of mental unwellness. And so still the level of commitment there, I just feel like deserves my attention at least. And if you say, where did this story go wrong?

Because he's a scientist who thinks that he's proven that his love for his daughters is not real. It's, you know, just a matter of genetic, you know, demand. And he decides to go out. He just can't accept this. He's proven it, but he won't accept it. You say, okay, this is an admirable person. I really admire that. But when you get to that juncture, to decide that it's somehow But when you get to that juncture, to decide that it's somehow your job to prove that mankind is, you know, capable of selfless acts and all these kind of things, it's like, dude, like, no, just go to the store and get your daughter her birthday present and bring it to her and enjoy that. Like, that's the answer. But again, this is a guy who worked on the Manhattan Project as his first job out of college, and then was working for IBM or whoever the hell,

like 1950s super corporation. And it just wasn't ambitious enough for him. You had to be bigger. It had to be something he had to really accomplish on a vast scale. And the answer, I think, is that, like, that's the sin of pride, you know, that destroyed him. Even though I think he... There's a lot admirable there.

I mean, you probably, if you've listened to the Jim Jones series I did, you probably picked up on this. Like, I didn't start out... I actually started that series out... Well, I didn't expect to end up feeling the way I did about the People's Temple as I did by the end. And similarly to the George Price story, ended in obviously just insanity

and disaster. But I couldn't help but develop a certain amount of affection for a lot of these people and the organization itself to a degree, like just reading through the things they were confronted with and the ways they responded to like very unique times. The 60s were in the 70s too if you were sort of into radical politics and those things was crazy, crazy, crazy time. And I ended up with a great deal of admiration there too. But again, like it's that sin of pride that, you know, that causes people to think that they

want to do good in the world. But actually, it's my job to like, to fix the world. To do all the work. Yeah. All of it, baby. That's where it gets bad. Yeah, I see what you're saying. It's like, you know, St. Teresa's Catholic Saint, there's a lot of St. Teresa's. This is a different St. Teresa, probably less known. But she has this concept of the little way, which is you don't need to be... It doesn't matter what good act you do. You don't have to do... You don't have to like...

It's not your job alone to save the world. In fact, if to save the world. In fact, if everyone in the world just shifted a little bit instead of going under the bridge and giving other things away and doing this sort of, sounds like bipolar honestly, but doing this sort of like where it's me, I'm the hero. Forget that. The hero is the collective engaged in these tiny little acts. This will create a huge social change

versus this thing which, if we are gonna play around the idea of an actual personification of evil, that according to Mark Twain, we should be praying to. Or for. Oh wait, no, oops. Oops! This thing is a master at grabbing good things

and then getting inside the good thing to turn them into evil. Not stopping people from doing good things. That's pretty easy to do just kill him Didn't work with Jesus. Whoops. Now, there's fucking Christianity everywhere. I fucked up It's like when you see someone smash the spider egg and the spiders go everywhere except they're good spiders But so what do we do we get into the. Get into the thing. And so you see this... This episode of the DTFH has been supported by my friends at Quince. And let me tell you, when they reached out, expressing interest in supporting this podcast

beloved by millions of people, my wife said you must allow them to sponsor the podcast because she pre-loved Quince. There is no higher endorsement than the Erin Trussell endorsement. She has a very specific set of things she likes. And you're going to love Quince. It's actually very nice. You feel like you're wearing luxury items like lightweight shirts and shorts from $30, parts for any occasion, and comfortable lounge sets.

They even have premium luggage options, durable duffel bags to carry it all. The best part? All Quince items are priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. By partnering directly with Top Factories, Quince cuts out the cost of the middleman and passes the savings on to us. And Quince only works with factories that use safe, ethical, and responsible manufacturing practices and premium fabrics and finishes. I love that.

And if you don't love that, you need to take a long look in the mirror and ask yourself why you don't love that. Are you freaking kidding me? You want to wear clothes and feel guilty about it? Wake up! Wake up with Quince. For your next trip, treat yourself to the lux upgrades you deserve from Quince. Go to quince.com slash dunkin for 365 day returns plus free shipping on your order. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash Duncan to get free shipping and 365 day returns.

Quince dot com slash Duncan. Thank you Quince. Where compassion gets hijacked. Anybody looks at the world like, oh my God, I've got to do something about this. And that thing has to be, I'm going to do it all. And then boom. So much of the evil that takes place in the world is really a result of a hijacking of our virtues. Soldiers in the My Lai Hamlet in Vietnam who were just massacring civilians are taking

revenge because they love their friends that they've watched die from landmines over the last few months. And that's not an excuse. It's just, it shows how anything can be corrupted. And that's mostly how the devil works, is he takes. Most people cannot be convinced to do something they believe is evil. If it's expedient enough or gets them out of enough trouble

or something, they might just do it and suck up the future consequences. But for the most part, people have to tell themselves stories in order to make it work for them. That's right. Another example of like, kind of similar to George Price, I talked about him in the same episode is, you know who Mitchell Heisman is?

No. He was this kid guy. He's a young man, but like 20s or 30s. And he decided, you know, he came to, he's another one of these like George Price types in the sense, very smart. And he came to the conclusion after reading Nietzsche and all the usual stuff that, you know, he was a nihilist and that all the things that we think have meaning don't actually have meaning and et cetera, et cetera. And so he decides that he's going to commit suicide not

just because he's not that he's depressed because everything has no meaning but just to prove that no I really believe this and things really have no meaning right yeah and so he decides first he's gonna spend as much time as it takes it ends up being five full years that he's writing a manifesto like a book, right? And you can find this online. Look up Mitchell Heisman's suicide note. I read the whole thing for the simple reason that I just feel like somebody who showed

this level of commitment deserves to be read, you know? And so, and it's interesting. He's a very smart guy. And after five years, he finishes it. He was not like his mother, his girlfriend that he had the whole time great relationships No signs of mental illness or depression or anything like that. Wait, hold on. No signs of mental. It's like hey What are you writing over there? Yeah. Well, he's working on a suicide. No, he's working on a book, you know, okay, okay and

And after five years he finishes it and, he finishes it. And when he finishes it, he goes and puts on an all-white suit and goes to the chapel in the middle of the Harvard campus, stands on the steps in the middle of the day, and blows his brains out. And when you read through his manifesto, there's a lot of stuff in there about history and just all these philosophy, all those kind of things. But then when you kind of get to the end, especially like in the last few chapters of it and everything, what you realize is this guy's actually just depressed. Yeah, like that's what this is. And all of this is like an elaborate

justification for his depression and the desperate measure he's about to take to get out from under it, you know? And it's that, again, it's that sin of pride, like, okay, even if you do believe that, like the idea that it's somehow your responsibility to make a statement to history, that this is the truth, you know? And it ends up very sad, because again, like you said, I mean, and he was an in evil person, obviously,

like if you talk about baby Hitler or something, but everybody was just a little kid, man, with their whole life ahead of them at one point. And I think about like Uday Hussein, right? Saddam's son who was just, you know, maybe there's some propaganda in here, but there's enough that we know is not propaganda. He was an unbelievably sadistic, violent, evil person, right?

The type of person who would go to a wedding that was happening and threaten to shoot the groom if he didn't let him take his wife, like just an evil man, a sadistic person. And I think about somebody like that, somebody that is just, you know, if he moved in next door to me, I'd somebody that is just, you know, if he moved in next door to me, I'd move to another state, you know?

And you think about the fact that that was a three-year-old boy who didn't even know yet that he was Saddam Hussein's son. He didn't know that when he was six years old, his dad was going to be bringing him to watch torture sessions because he was going to need to harden himself for that life, like later on. And it's not as if, like, before he was born was born, he was like in the waiting room, you know, his little spirit like in the waiting room and they're like, who wants to be Saddam Hussein's son? And he raised his hands that I do. Yeah, that's the world he got thrust into. Right. You

know, he was plucked out and thrust into it. And the way life works, I mean, we all know this, right, is how, like, the idea that, like, you know, by the time we sort of wake up and sort of look around and be like, oh, I need to make decisions and I actually need to like, you know, have a direction, a goal in my life and just sort of have values that my life should reflect and do. By the time, like, we have those thoughts at all for the most part, there's already just so much momentum behind our life, just our personal life, momentum that's built into us through the culture

and our peers and just everything that we can make like minor deviations most of the time to our course. It's really hard to, because you're just, you're thrust into life, and you're already all in the middle of it, and everything's already happening, because you're just, you're thrust into life. Yeah. You're already all in the middle of it. That's right. And everything's already happening, and you just have to sort of, it's like if you wake up, if you wake up and you're in the middle of a battle, and it's like, oh shit, like, where's my, I guess,

where's my gun? Like, I have to deal with this. Sure. And you're not even thinking, like, wait, why are we fighting? Like, should we really, should there be war? Like, I do think that's a great way to put it. It's sleepwalking. It's like when I look back at some of the insane shit I've done and I think about like where my mind was, it's like I would, most of the time you're, you're just bumbling through a kind of dreamlike state.

You haven't even gotten to the point of thinking about reactivity or why am I doing this or what everything makes sense because you're using these past patterns that were taught to you about, you know, if this is why you see these emergent personalities that seem to be identical when you look at Twitter bios. Almost like even though it's different people they have the same spirit living in them and the spirit says things like, I'm your best friend but your worst enemy. I love dogs. You know what I mean? It's like, it's like, but it's a repeating echo of a type of a persona, which is if you hit me I'm going to hit back twice as hard. And this repeats, so many people will say that and think when they say it, this is who

I am. They don't realize, yeah, it might be who you are, but you are also apparently exactly the same person all over the planet. There's a lot of yous out there and you guys hit back twice as hard when you get hit, which, by the way, is a recipe for the apocalypse. If you want to fuck up a world, create, if we make a simulated reality and place within it beings that are prone to violence

and then limit their resources and then say, the one rule of engagement is if someone punches you, punch back twice as hard, it's going to be a never ending eternal blood bath and escalating blood bath. And this is what I feel like we're in. And we all agree that it's not good to punch people but the threat of you punching back twice as hard is the only thing that's going to keep them from punching you so actually

it's like a peaceful idea. So drop the nuke. We gotta drop the fucking nuke. We got to drop the fucking nuke or what but again, I you know, I Get some some people and I I will take this critique because I think it's a good one when I say and we've talked about this at dinner and I and I But something you and I have in common. I think is we are very against randomly blowing up babies and you just shouldn't drop bombs on children. It's pretty, okay, maybe you've,

I've got some ambivalence on the question, but yeah, I guess maybe, you know, 60, 40. Okay, you've changed a little. But, but so, and essentially this is like, I can't remember, there's a Tolstoy book where he's basically saying you can't be a pro-war Christian. Like, you just can't do it. The two don't, you can't go to war if you're a Christian.

You can't kill anyone if you're a Christian. Nonviolence. Then I read that stupid letter Gandhi wrote to Hitler, you know, and you're like, oh yeah, did you feel good when he mailed it to Hitler? It's like I'm fucking meth getting a goddamn letter from Gandhi laughing his ass off. Hey guys, Gandhi says we should just stop the war! But it's sweet, I guess, but that's when you look at that, even though there's a sweet thing behind it. And I don't think Gandhi was quote, virtue signaling, as people say, I think he really

like was trying to do everything within the nonviolent paradigm to stop horror from happening. The critique of the stance against all forms of violence, specifically like war is okay. So what do we do? Just sit back and let Hitler take over the world? Is that your fucking plan? What do we do? It's some It's kind of like i'm the worst kind of meat eater man I'm a guilty fucking meat eater. I'm like the worst kind of serial killer. I'm gonna cry while I strangle you You know what? I mean, i'm still gonna strangle you my dick's hard

But you're gonna feel my hot wet tears land on your head while I choked the life out of you now There's in other words like there's this Point of view which is like we live in a system Where for there to be stability there must be? violence so your anti-war Bullshit is actually not anti-war. It's pro-tyranny. You're just saying, okay, let's just sit back on our ass and hope our nice, happy Christian smiles

are gonna keep the fucking boots out of our fucking face. You dumb fuck, I'm gonna kill you. And then they, I don't, they don't say it like that, but you know what I mean. Yeah, excuse me. First, like, before I respond to that, I want to respond to the first part, because you say you're a guilty mediator. I remember when I was a kid, me and my cousins and my buddies,

they lived kind of out of town a little bit. And we would get our BB guns, pellet guns, whatever. And we'd just go walk on a dusty trail. And dude, it was just a holocaust, like everywhere we went. I mean, it was, if it moved and it had feathers or fur, it was dead. Period. Like it just didn't matter. We wouldn't shoot a dog or a cat. We weren't evil kids like that, but anything else, like it was done. Like it just didn't matter. And we felt nothing about it. Right? And we did this for years when I was, even when I was like a young teenager.

We felt nothing about it, right? And we did this for years, even when I was a young teenager. And a few years back, we got a bunch of chickens, like a little farm. And there was just a flock of crows that would always hang out around our chickens and just drive our chickens completely insane and harass them and really making them uncomfortable in ways that were affecting them.

And so I took my pellet gun out and I shot a crow. Oh, God damn it, no. And I was really surprised at the time. It doesn't surprise me now, like looking back on everything that's happened since then, everything that like, I felt extremely guilty about that.

And when I went over there and picked it up and you know, got rid of it, like I still feel guilty about it. Like right now as I'm describing it to you, I feel guilty about it. Right now, as I'm describing it to you, I feel guilty about it. And so there is a part of me that is willing to admit that part of this is just a, it's maybe sentimentality on my part.

It's just where I'm at personally on this. Like if I, I find that I just don't have the stomach for, I watch this, there's all this crazy war footage now from Ukraine and stuff that we've never had from any of these wars. You have all these sources of video. It's like, it's bordering on the Super Bowl at this point. Totally, totally. And there was this one where it was the first person from a drone, a suicide drone.

And there was a truck, I don't know if it was a Russian or Ukrainian truck, I can't remember, I didn't know at the time, but there's guys in that truck and the suicide drone comes in, boom, boom, comes around to the side, boom, and it just won't blow up. And the guys are trying to get their seatbelts off and whatever else, and then the video ends, and the only thing I felt afterwards

was like a sense of relief that those guys were all right. I have no idea who they are, what side they're on, what they've done or anything like that. That's just sort of where I've come to at this point in my life, you know? And so I can admit like on some level the people who say that you're just overly sentimental, you're letting your emotion cloud, that's all. I'm not gonna completely shut those people down. But I do think that like when we talk about faith, you know, that faith, people think of faith as believing things even though you know

that they might not be true. But faith is doing things even though you know they might be pointless. And so, you know, when he says love your enemy, does that mean like that your enemy is going to win and all the things you care about and value are going to get destroyed? Maybe, but it's an act of faith to say that that's not how it's going to work. And, you know, and maybe I won't be around us. Because think about it, right? Like it wasn't a bunch of preachers who spread Christianity from Jerusalem out into the Roman Empire and everywhere else. It was martyrs

that did it. It was the example of martyrs. And like that was really the thing that people rallied behind. It wasn't theology or any of that kind of stuff. It was the example of martyrs. And you say, well, why is that? Because Christianity has a unique understanding of what a martyr is, right? You listen to like rhetoric that comes out of Gaza and stuff. It's like every single person with an AK who's shooting at an Israeli tank and gets blown up as a martyr, right? That's not what a martyr is in Christianity. You're not dying for a cause and becoming a martyr in Christianity.

What you're doing is, you know, you you if you go back to the like the crucifixion, which is the, you know, obviously the go back to the crucifixion, which is the, you know, obviously the central story in the Christian myth, the, you know, the most interesting thing about that story to me is how you had these guys, these 12 guys, and not only those 12 guys, but all the crowds that were following him and everything else, the same people who were waving the palm fronds a week before when he entered the city were the same people saying, crucify him, crucify him, you know? And you say, well, what happened there? And then you have the example of Peter, right, who denies Christ three times before the cock crows. And you say, well, is this

a story to tell us that, you know, Peter was just weak, Peter had this flaw or something like that in his faith? And it's like actually the opposite. They spent the entire rest of the book explaining you that, no, Peter's the rock. Peter's the dude who doesn't flinch. He's the dude who's willing to pull his sword and defend Jesus when the temple guards come to arrest him. He's not a... it's not a lack of physical courage, but when you're confronted by the demands of a mob, people, especially if they're... these are your peers, these are people part of your community, people like even the very, very best of us shrink from that. Yes. And that your job in that instance is to say, is not to die for Jesus. Don't pull your sword and go attack the guards and then get yourself killed.

That doesn't make you a martyr. You die with Jesus. You say, no, I will not go along with this, and you're going to have to go through me to get to him. And if they do go through you, then that's what it takes. That's what a martyr is. And that's a martyr. Yeah. Whoa! Christianity is so hardcore and so misunderstood. That is so hardcore.

And the, I don't know if you know this, and stop me if you do, I ended up on an airplane with a Methodist, are they ministers or pastors? I don't know the title. But I'm just sitting there. We start talking, find out he's a minister. What's your favorite book of the Bible? I ask him, book of John. Oh, shit, that's mine too. Because I read, I mean, that's where I had my first Christ experience because I was on acid. You know, at the book of John and like, I don't know, something about the LSD and the combination of reading it broke through all the conditioning, and I got it. Like, I got it. And once you get it,

it's hard to un-get it. But then he starts going into detail about the book of John, which is a non-synoptic gospel. It's different from the... And he was saying that, in the book of John, what's interesting, he's talking about Peter, and there's a verse that I vaguely remember, which is where Jesus is asking, like, Peter, like, do you love me? But the word love, it gets translated as just love. And there's three different types of love. What is it, agape in that instance? Agape, the love of a friend, yeah, sex love.

Obviously, Peter didn't say, yeah, I want to hump you. It was like, but the answer was not agape. One of them is like the love of like the universe, like God. And it wasn't that. He said, I love you like a brother. I don't think you're God. It was more doubt from Peter. And then he was pointing out, and that is who Jesus said, you are the rock of, you are the Christian church. And this pattern happens over and over throughout the Bible, which is God is always choosing these miscreants, these people that makes no sense.

And also it's saying like, yeah, if you're any kind of lineage that you're engaging in, if you're feeling doubt about it, if you're denying it, if you're turning your back on it, if you're betraying it, just remember that person was the person who Jesus said, you are going to be the great church. You're starting my church. Whoa, that's so cool, man. To me, that's beautiful. A lot of Christians and religious people in general

think of doubt as like a weakness or that there's some, if I'm having doubts, then there's something wrong here. I need to fix this so that I no longer have these doubts. That is the wrong way to approach it. You can... Even if you are, say, like an Orthodox Catholic, where you have just a long, long tradition behind you and dogmas you're expected to accept and take on board and everything, even if that's where you're coming from, you can say to yourself in all humility, right, that look, I'm a person who's going to live like 80 years if I'm lucky. I've been thinking about these things part time since I was 20 maybe, you know, most

of the time not thinking about this at all. But sometimes I think about it and these are the thoughts I have about what's right and wrong and so forth. And so I'm not going to put whatever conclusions like I come up with, I'm not going to be so prideful as to put those ahead of 1500 years of our smartest and best and most dedicated people discussing these very things. I'm going to accept the conclusions that this institution that I trust

has arrived at after these times. But there are things in here that I just, I really struggle with. Whether maybe it's like, in the modern age today when social conditions have just changed so much and the sexual morality demands and the by whatever it is, or women not being allowed to speak in church. conditions have just changed so much and it's the sexual morality demands in the body, whatever it is, or women not being allowed to speak in church.

People struggle with these things, whether they admit it to themselves or not. And a lot of people sort of repress those doubts or avoid thinking about them when those doubts, that's actually your path. That's your way into the religion. And you may have those doubts when you die at 80 years old, but I'll bet that you wrestling with them has enriched your faith in ways that you just saying,

you know, yes, you know, father, whatever. Like way more than doing that, you know? That's your path. I think Carl Jung even says something like that about, you know, is it your, like your flaw, your shadow or something like that about, you know, is it your like your flaw your shadow or something like is your No that that What's the Christian patriarch who literally wrestled with an angel who has that Jacob? Yeah, it's that's that's the symbol, right? Like you I mean think about think about how crazy this is, right? Like this is always this is

okay, so you got Adam and Eve, they're in the garden. Yeah. And they get tempted and they, you know, you have to imagine if God's omnipotent, omniscient being and everything that he built this universe and he had to have foreseen that this was going to happen. But one way or another, they rebel. And so they go out and they're in the world now. And that act of rebellion, have you ever seen or read the comic book? I think Netflix made a show of it. It was actually a pretty good show called Jessica Jones. No.

So it's a comic book story, you know, and it's a little silly or whatever. But there's this woman who's super strong. That's her strength, Jessica Jones. And she's like a private detective or whatever. And the villain in it is this guy called the Purple Man. And the Purple Man's power is, if you hear his voice and he says,

Duncan, take that bottle and shove it all the way into your eye socket, no hesitation. Pick it up and you just do it. He has total complete control over you, right? 100%. And she was like, because she was super strong, he's like, this is gonna be a very valuable person to me. And so he made her his sort of girlfriend slash servant,

you know, and he would have her do things, break into places or whatever. And at one point, he orders her to kill this woman. And for whatever reason, she has this moment of awakening and she refuses to do it and she runs off. Well from that moment on all he could think about was her. This is like a guy who from the time he was a kid if he said mommy I want a cookie, yes

son here's a million cookies. Teacher I don't think I should have failed this. I think I should have gotten an A. You know what, you're right, here's an A. This girl I have a crush on in middle school, I'd really like to, he's never been told no or faced any resistance whatsoever in his entire life. And the curse of that is he doesn't know,

did my parents actually love me? Right. Did anybody who ever did anything positive for me, like, he's in his own universe. Everybody else is not really human. They're just video game players, right? And so God creates this universe, and the minerals, the vegetables, the fish in the sea, the creeping things, all the entire universe from the very beginning, right? It's all just operating according to natural law.

So you can say like it's operating according to the structure of God's mind, right? And that's it. And all of a sudden, in the middle of that, you have this one creature that says no. Almost right away. How could you, how could that not become the most important thing to you? It's like, it would be as if like you were dreaming having a dream and then like all of a sudden like there's this other person in your dream that like However, you know, like you know that like no there's actually somebody there like that's not me creating this

There's actually a person you're acting independently within my yeah. That's the only thing you could you could focus on right and so You get into this and this is the Jessica thing you could focus on, right? And so you get into this, and this is the Jessica Jones story does this really well, where the purple man, he actually does love Jessica Jones. How could he not? She's the only other real human on the planet. Which means she's the only person on the entire planet

who can actually choose to love him. Who can actually choose to love him. Wow. Who can actually choose to like, you know, that he can trust that her affection is real. Yeah. And yet, the very thing that makes her unique and valuable to him is the fact that she can say no, I don't want you, I don't love you. That's the only thing that matters, right? And so when you get up to like Jacob wrestling with God, that whole story is crazy because, you know, he's gonna go meet his brother Esau the next day and it's a big build-up. But the

night before, he stays behind on the other side of the river and God comes to him and they get into a wrestling match. And Jacob actually holds his own, right? So that he's, like as morning comes, God puts his hip out of socket to sort of like force a stalemate, but by the time the sun is coming up, Jacob's holding on to him and God tells him, let me go for dawn is breaking. And Jacob says, I will not let you go unless you bless me. And so he blesses him and he gives him a new name, which is Israel, which means one who struggles against or contends with God.

It's like, wait a second. So the patriarch of Israel, the name itself is a reflection of the fact that you can resist me, that you're not just operating by the laws of motion that I put in, the very fact that you can tell me no. And then the entire rest of the Old Testament is them telling him no at various points and rebelling against him and him losing his mind and just you know just punishing them in extraordinary ways and and having these just insane rants of like a betrayed

husband you know yes and you know and what you see being worked out there because I think one of the this is maybe a heresy or whatever if you you know fortunately or unfortunately I was not raised in like a, I didn't have a structured religious education, right? And so like, it allows me to sort of think of things differently, even if, you know, you have to be careful not to be led astray. Guardrails are sometimes there for sure. But I think that, and I think if you take the text seriously, this is not really that controversial, but if you ask any Christian, pretty much, does God change throughout the Bible? They'll tell you no. Even if you look at the Old and New

Testament, you can look at the craziest genocidal parts of the book of Judges and then the book of John, and they're like they're like nope same just nothing changes I don't believe that at all. I think it's very very clear. That's not what's going on. Right if you have a being Who has I mean the the very idea of him Encountering resistances. It's a it's a logical impossibility, right He has a thought that there should be light and light is invented, you know The whole universe is invented just because he has out of his mind, you know

Never encountered like any kind of resistance, right? when resistance is like That's what that's what throws us back on ourselves and drives us inward and causes us to think of ourselves as something separate from... I mean, you see this in, like, early infant development, right? Where they talk about how when an infant's born, has no concept of self, obviously. It's just a... It just exists a little, you know? And all it knows is that occasionally,

I have these sensations that make me want to call out for something to help it, and then a nipple shows up in my mouth, and it goes away, and that's it. But then over time, you know, because mama's just a human, you start crying for the nipple, but it takes a little while for her to show up. And then you start to be like, oh wait, me and mama are not the same thing.

Oh wait, me and this whole place are not the same thing. I'm just this one little thing, and it's like, you know, and that this is a massive crisis that like, is like the seed of our psychology in a lot of ways. And you know, I think when you get to, like in the Bible, like to me like the crescendo of at least the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible portion of it is the Book of Job. And very interestingly, I don't know the history, I've been meaning to look it up, but I don't know why Christians rearrange the books in this manner, but the Book of Job in the Old Testament, not in the Old Testament, but in the Hebrew Bible, so the Jewish Bible, the

Book of Job, the appearance of God in the whirlwind when he gives him that speech at the end, is the last time God speaks to man directly in the entire story, right? And so, and if you're a Christian, that means it was the last statement he gave to man before he said, this is my son, you know, and the dove descends. That was the next thing he said, if you look at it that way. And so I take that book very, very seriously. And I think that, you know, you have this like, you have this, okay, yeah, if you think about the Israelites wandering through the desert after they leave Egypt, right? And as soon as they get out there, they've been gone a few days, and they have no food,

they have no water, they're just wandering through a desert, and they start complaining to Moses. They're saying, what did you bring us out here for? Yeah, things weren't great in Egypt. We had food. And these people, like this is not like a militia he's leading out there. This is a community of people. They're watching their children starve to death, right? And when they start complaining

about that and expressing their anxiety over it, God just slaughters them, mercilessly kills thousands of them, sends snakes to bite them, just rages, how dare you complain? And the thing that strikes me when I read that is like that God, he doesn't know. God knows everything, you know, but there are certain like logical requirements that, you know, the whole like, can he lift a, or... Can he make a rock so big? It's like, these are logical problems that, you know, that are limits on his power sort of.

And, you know, and you have one here where like, yeah, he knows everything. He doesn't know what it's like to watch his child starve to death. Right, so he's having first child parenting issues, essentially. He's got no social skills. No social skills, and also his own sense of himself as separate from all of this or having a relationship to it is developing in real time time and you're watching it over the course of the story Huh?

And so when he's like doing this to the to the Israelites you realize like he has no idea what it's like to be afraid He has no idea what it's like to to suffer To watch his child starve to death what that's like what you know, he has no idea And so he goes through like you have the whole story, he's just again like just just brutality after brutality because they whore after other gods or whatever. Until you get to the book of Job. And the book of Job is so interesting because it starts off by telling you, and you know Christians will tell you that like no person is without sin or whatever, but I think that's why the book of Job at the very beginning says, yeah, we get that. But this guy for the purposes of

this story was blameless. He was without sin. Yeah. And he loses his family, all his goods just suffers terribly. Why? Because God kind of got tricked by Satan into like taking this bet. And actually, like, you know, people always put all the responsibility for Satan on that. If you actually read the way the story is structured, God's sitting in his throne room and Satan comes through and God says, hey, get over here. Have you seen my servant Job? You know, he's the best. He's just totally loved. He started it. He's bragging basically.

Yeah, and he basically challenges the devil in a way to be, you know, by provoking him in that way. And so Job has things happen to him that if you're a human being, and you know what it's like to watch your children be killed or just any of these terrible things, I mean, just unbelievable suffering that this man has put through on a whim

that means really nothing. It's just a whim in heaven, you know, a bet in heaven. And Job starts complaining, you know, he goes through for 30 chapters as his friends show up and give them all the standard theological reasons for like, well, they must have done... The point is God is just, which means that if these things happen, there's a reason or whatever. They give him the... What is some if these things happen, there's a reason or whatever they give him What is some of the things happen? Like we're talking boils, right? That's early phase job, right? Yeah, doesn't he get boils? I think it's boils house destroyed children die

Literally every bad thing that can happen to you all the bad things I'm the least until he's literally sitting in the ashes of his burned-down house with a pottery shard scraping like... Boils! Scratching his boils in ash! That's what he's reduced to. And his wife is the only person in his family left, and she comes up to him of all people and says, enough of this, just curse God and die. So he goes through for 30 chapters, and he doesn't curse God, but boy, he lets him have it though. And the whole thrust of Job's lament for 30 chapters, just unbelievable.

Like to me, it's just, it's up there with like the Bhagavad Gita, the Book of John, a few other things. That's the most, one of the pinnacles of like world religious literature. Where he basically like challenges him to come down like almost like in a court of law. He's like, no, no, no, no, no. You said that if I did this this that and this then you would do this this and this. Yeah, I did that shit

What is going on? You need to come down here and you need to explain yourself to me and his friends are like, well, you must have done some There was a hidden sin about he's like no I refused to accept that I refused to accept any of that I did nothing wrong and I want him to come down here and tell me why he is doing this to me. And that intransigent defiance of Job in that, refusing to accept all those standard explanations and to admit a sin that he did not commit. of Job in that, you know, refusing to accept all those standard explanations and, you know, to admit a sin that he did not commit.

I think it finally created that moment of resistance in God where he got kind of thrown back on himself and realized that, like, I mean, because look, I don't really care, like, you can come up with any sort of abstract, theological justification you want. God is the villain in the book of Job. And I think we're supposed to read it that way. Yeah. And I think Job is the one who showed him that, look, all of this stuff, these people you've been killing,

the things you've been putting them through, you've been so angry because they act like humans. Guess what? This is, like you put us in this world. In a world that is, it's a thresher, you know, it's a threshing floor. I mean you throw us into this world where everybody we know is going to die. Yeah. We're gonna watch them die or they're gonna watch us die. Everything we care about we know is eventually gonna go away. Yeah. All that and then we have to like just live in this world and deal with it. I have to live in a world where six-year-old children get leukemia and die.

Yeah. And this is the world that we live in. And I think that having that encounter and the significance of God's response to it being the final statement to mankind, basically, in the Hebrew Bible until... Can you actually pull up, what does he say, like, who are you to question that which created the Leviathan? Is that it? Yeah, yeah. Pull up, just, I guess, Google, who are you? I don't know, do you know the verse exactly?

It's, well, you get up to, like, I think, like chapter 38 or 39. It's up there, like in the final chapter or two. Google, like, who are you to question the Leviathan? Isn't this the last thing he said to him? He's like... This episode of the DTFH has been brought to you by my futuristic friends at Squarespace. Listen, it's incredible. It's an evolving spaceship type service. You want to build a website? Yes. Yes, you can do that and you can do it quickly.

You want to do some kind of silly website under, I'll tell you, this actually, I was at a cafe. I like to eavesdrop on people, I know that's fucked up. I'm listening to this couple have a conversation. Now this guy, he's like, I felt so bad for this woman. He's telling her all this like, strenuous garbage she's gonna have to do to build a website. I wanted, I couldn't believe it. It's like he time

traveled in from the early 90s. He was like a web designer for the early 90s. He's explaining different colored hyperlinks to her, sort of like basic bitch design shit to her. She's taking notes. He was explaining how long it was going to take, you know, like a long time, a long time for this poor fool to work, I guess, with him to make this what sounded like just a barren, rotten, empty, dead, aesthetically displeasing, useless website. And I'm sitting there eating and I'm holding my tongue because I, and I knew it's so cheesy because it's a sponsor.

What am I going to do? Like turn into a commercial at a cafe? But it was so hard to not say, you should just use Squarespace. I know they're my sponsor. I won't even give you my offer code because I know that's cheesy. It sounds like I'm some kind of traveling Squarespace salesperson But I it was compassion. I'm telling you you don't have to go through this hell You don't need some weird dude shoveling the protein bowl into his mouth bits of bacon

Spilling over his greasy gums and into the in under the notes. She's taking You don't have to go through that anymore. You just go to Squarespace. They have everything you need to make a beautiful website and you can do it fast. Squarespace gives you everything you need to offer services and get paid all in one place, from consultations to events and experience.

Showcase your offerings in a customizable website designed to attract clients and grow your business. Get paid in time with professional on-brand invoices and online payments. Plus, streamline your workflow with built-in appointment scheduling and email marketing tools. You see it's much more than building a website. It's literally everything you could need to run a business. Practically everything you need. I probably can't say it's literally everything you need because they didn't business, practically everything you need. I probably can't say it's literally everything you need

because they didn't tell me to say that. I'm sure there's some other, definitely something that you, like they're not gonna clean your toilets. With Squarespace's collection of cutting edge design tools, anyone can build a bespoke online presence that perfectly fits their brand or business. Start with Blueprint AI, Squarespace's AI Enhance

website builder to get a fully custom website in just a few steps. I've tested this. I've tested this and it's incredible. It works like so fast. Late at night, I built a website at like 2 a.m. and I got four vodka sodas and it looked great. The best, the good news, here's the good news. You don't even, you can just try it out for free. Go to squarespace.com forward slash Duncan, try it out for free. Don't believe me, fine. Feelings hurt, but okay.

I guess we live in a world where we can't believe everything we hear. Squarespace.com forward slash Duncan, try it out for free. When you're ready to launch, use offer code Duncan to get 10% off your first order of a website or a domain again at Squarespace.com Ford slash Duncan use offer code Duncan to get 10% off your first order of a website or a domain. Thank you Squarespace Um

Um Hang on it's a long it's like it's like pages, but it's fucking cool It's like basically it's like who the fuck are you I made the way I made I don't know if he meant whales maybe so I made dinosaurs. Well, the way people, like a standard Christian interpretation of that is that this is almost like an ego-driven thing. He's coming to Job and being like, do you have any idea how big and strong and powerful and old I am? You're sitting there in a pile of ash scratching your boils.

I made dinosaurs. Right, and I think that after what happened to Job and the injustice of everything, that's very like unsatisfying kind of conclusion to that story right but I think another way of looking at it is he's telling him like you know you want me to come down and explain to you like why you deserve this. What in any of what you've experienced in your entire life has led you to think that deserve has anything to do with with this stuff. It just doesn't this is the world Does the does the gazelle deserve to get ripped apart by the lion?

you know does just all of these things that happen where you know, and I think the the the core of it really is that in order for Job for you to even be here in any capacity asking these questions, like the world has to be structured the way it is. It has to be structured to, you know, to change and evolve over time and that's how you got here and that's how this whole thing works and if it doesn't then the world is just a dead place that doesn't, place that doesn't move or have any kind of becoming. And so this is how it has to work.

But for us, you know, we experience most changes suffering. Yeah. And we experience the anticipation of changes like anxiety and fear. These are like inherent to our condition, you know, of living in the world. And so I think that God says, and this is me speaking as a Christian, obviously, that everybody thinks of the crucifixion story in terms of like, old, I still don't understand how this became, I mean, I understand the historical development of the idea, but how so many people came to accept a version of the crucifixion story that is essentially just an enlarged version of just pagan sacrifice

stories. You have an angry God and he needs to be appeased by sacrifice blood and yeah you can keep doing it like with animals and stuff, but you gotta do it again and again, but this is the Son of God and he's perfect and so that's a perfect sacrifice and it puts in it finally appeases Yes, and you think of that and you're like, well, I mean if God doesn't want to punish us Like why does he have to go through all this elaborate send his son to die? Yeah, you know and all those kind of things I and there's another heresy for me, but um heresy too Yeah, I think that you know every like like people think of the crucifixion as the means by which man reconciled to God. I think it was the means by which God was reconciled to man.

Wow. It was him saying like, look, I kind of get it now. I kind of get what you've been going through this entire time that I didn't get before, you know, because how could I? But I kind of get it now. And I can't change the way the world works. It has to work this way. What I can do is I can come down there and experience it with you. Yeah, I can come down there I can send my son, you know, however, you want to think about the Trinity or whatever But like, you know, I can come down there send my son down there and I can suffer and be humiliated and spit on and tortured

And killed with the rest of you. Yeah, and that by doing that, I mean, the very significance of like, you know, because people will say like, well, yeah, but he was God. Jesus was God. He knew he was going to after this was all over, he was going to end up in heaven or whatever. It's like, no, no, no, they kind of go out of their way to let us know when he says, Father, Father, why have you forsaken me? But he kind of like wasn't so sure about

that, like, you know, at the very, very end. Like, he had reached a point where he felt abandoned by God. Yep. And like, so he experienced all the things then that we experience in the way that we experience him. Like, real fear. That night before, in the garden, he gets arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane where he's there like saying, please, like is there any other way we can do this? Like I'll do it, but fuck man, like can we please, like there must be something. Something else. You know, but not my will but yours be done. And like, but that humanness of like this is Jesus Christ the night before, you know, he gets arrested to be crucified

terrified about what's about to happen yeah, and then he goes through all of the again not just the violence but the humiliation and the doubts of like you know Was I just full of shit this all time like is like you know all the things that we go through and That by sharing that experience with it with us I think that it you know it's the means by which we can, that God can reconcile himself without changing the universe and the structure of reality in a way that would just ruin the whole thing. It's like God's enlightenment. God realizes, I am you.

There is no distinction here. There it goes, you know, you think of God as some kind of unified consciousness, and yet there is distinction clearly in the way that the interactions that you've been describing imply a distinction. In this case, there's fusion that happens here. The crucifixion represents fusion. And, you know, this is a...

This event was so potent. It's like another way to put it, if you wanted to get psychoanalytical, you know, it's the superego merging. It's the neurosis, like, finally finding the catharsis. And, yeah, sure, any, like, anybody who encounters the initial story is gonna have a lot of very justifiable questions.

This seems idiotic. None of this makes sense. What are you talking about? My sins redeemed by what? Eating God meat? Really? I turn bread into imaginary God meat and then I'm okay again.

Fuck you! Where's my Richard Dawkins book? But the way you've just described it is what I love about Christianity. It's like, yeah, sure, there's a surface level stuff that is challenging on purpose, but then the deeper exploration leads you to an encounter with the epitome of what humans could be. It's a possibility. And whoa, once you taste that possibility, even though you might not be able to do it, and by that possibility, I mean fusion. We're talking about a—this is in, you know, Jesus, many of the parables, you know, the vine.

You know, you are the vine. If you're separated from the vine, you will wither. The vine is an invitation. You are now part of me now, not something, not my subjects anymore. And whoa, that's a heavy thing, man. And that's why I will always love it so much. And it's so, to me, what is so befuddling. And it's so, to me what is so befuddling, and I get it man, on one level we see the televangelist, whoever, but I am so befuddled by the amount of pushback I get if I talk about Jesus in a positive way on my podcast or in general. I can have Satanist on here. I can talk, you know, anything is fine, but for don't you fucking say positive things about Christianity. What the fuck is

that? Doesn't that seem weird to you though? I mean, really, like, it's like of all the world religions, it's cool to be Buddhist. It's even cool to be Muslim. But I think there's a certain amount, and you see this not only in like religious debates and thinking in the West, but there's like a certain amount of like xenophilia that has to do with it where like the strange and the foreign is just the exotic is kind of cool. That's a sweet way to look at it. I get creeped out. You know I get creeped out by it because you know I do just for my own sanity and not go spinning into some manic spiral. I like to deconstruct the idea of Satan into a symbol of, well, you've actually,

on your Easter episode, it's really cool, I think it was your Easter episode, you were talking about Satan as the accuser, Satan as the, but I like to take this, it's like I'm gonna go Joseph Campbell here. It's not real. There's no Satan, Satan, ah, come on, there's no Satan, and! Ah, come on! There's no Satan.

And yet, the reaction the world has to this philosophy, where from I can't really take anything more offensive. I mean, I'm sure there's lots of critiques like what you were mentioning earlier, like there's some, you know, patriarchal misogyny that shows up. If we're going to go to the Old Testament, everything you just described is like, okay, so you can't eat shellfish or, you know, I guess God just smushes his people like ants or whatever, right?

But you look at any world religion, you can find examples of that. And yet the fact that this one in particular is met with the identical reaction that Jesus was met with, that the fractal continues to this day, that I don't know of like, I'm sure there are examples of Hindu saints that were thrown on pyres. I'm just not as much aware. But when we talk about the Christian martyr, and you hear these stories, these people were being incinerated, their eyes were being gouged out, they were being tortured, and while they're being incinerated and tortured, they're praying for the people torturing them.

But I mean, like you think of Saul, it was like a national sport to feed Christians to lions. But what the fuck are they doing? Like if you look at the thing, it's like what is built in there that is so abhorrent to the world, but boy does it get a reaction from the world. Well, I mean, it's the real threat to Satan. You know, I mean, like's the real threat to Satan. So you believe in an actual Satan, Satan. I think he's an egregore, sort of, where do you believe in the military-industrial complex?

It's like, really, it's just a bunch of bureaucrats and employees at the defense contractors and executives and so forth who all have their own lives. But no, there's a thing. They don't have the military industrial complex headquarters and they have annual meetings or whatever, but it's a thing and it has a will and a certain amount of agency that we all feel and have to respond to.

And so it has reality, even if you can't point to its headquarters. And I think Satan's something like that. Like an egregoire is like an autonomous spiritual being that, you know, maybe has a fleeting reality if it's something that's created by... Santa Claus, Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny, Hamburglar. Yeah, sure. I mean, you have like even like William Butler Yeats, the Irish poet, who, you know, he was an occultist and...

I love him. Yeah, he would... Yeah, his poem, I've been studying his poem of vision for probably like 20 years I still don't understand it but I really love it but you know he would talk about has talked about how his little group that they that's the order of the Golden Dawn right yeah yeah that they conjured a an egregore a creature you know I guess a spiritual being that everybody saw and it was walking around and so forth. And so if you have like, for a small group of people to do something like that, it takes a tremendous amount

of just focus and discipline and all of the things that people like that put themselves through in order to be able to come together as a group and make something like that happen. I think that large groups of people who are really motivated by emotion and just all very, very powerful psychological currents flowing through the crowd and the mob, these things get generated like spontaneous.

And so yeah, I think Satan has reality. I don't believe in like a red guy with a pitchfork, but you know, there's a force out there that has an autonomous sense of agency and goals that are opposed to ours that you can identify as Satan. I do think that. And Christianity is sort of like the antithesis of all those goals. It's the antidote, the challenge, it's, and thus, if anything's going to be attacked, there it is. But, and so if, what do you think, if you had to summarize it, what is that?

What is the challenge? Why, why? So, you know, if you go, like the Romans, right? The Romans with their pagan religion, but really anybody, everywhere that Christianity went, people, the first response to it is that it was crazy. You know, our gods are powerful. They're on the top of the mountain, exalted, you know, in light.

And your literal symbol is you're telling us that the whole, not just that this is not a side passage in one of your stories, the whole center is that the this is not a side, you know, passage in one of your, in one of your stories. The whole center is that the one God of the universe, the creator of the universe, came down to be with mankind one time. And so this is obviously, he's thought about this, you know, he's put some thought in that, the presentation, right? And he came down to be humiliated, spit on, beaten, tortured, and killed as a common criminal. And that symbol is actually the thing that you all wear around your neck.

You have behind your altars at your churches. Like, to non-Christian cultures, that's an insane kind of thing to do. You know, I mean, it's just the opposite of what a god is supposed to be. Because they had, you know, I mean, like the Romans had an idea of fate and luck that, you know, when we say somebody got lucky,

like today it's almost an insult, you know, if the Romans said something like that, it's no, you were blessed by the gods, you know, you're doing something right, and therefore you were rewarded in these ways. And so somebody who, whatever, however he lived his life, or whoever he was, or anything like that, if he ended up like this, then no,

that's a person that does not deserve any of your respect, does not deserve any, certainly not your worship, you know? And that's how it was sort of viewed. But to then understand that like, you don't know, you wanna get real heretical. Number three. Yeah, so like, anything, any, okay, we were talking earlier about how Uday Hussain Hitler like whatever

It is there was a time when these were just children with their whole lives ahead of them who would never heard of fly Yeah, all maybe there's some Jeffrey Dahmer types out there who were just born Congenitally like that sure who knows but those you know fine But but 99.9% of all the evil in the world is committed by people who did not start out that way and who at the time probably did not believe they were doing something evil or thought that they were accepting the responsibility of doing something evil in order to further a greater good right the whole like grand inquisitor and the brothers

care myself kind of thing like it's, yeah, we have to bear the responsibility of being the ones who do this, but we're doing it for the greater good. That kind of thing. And oh, geez. Oh, right. And so and so you take all the evil in the world, whatever it is, you say, why was, you know, my mom's a bitch to me today? Why does my teacher hate me? Why did this person get murdered?

Why did this whole race of people get exterminated? All of those things, right? You can say, well, it was because of this. It's like, well, okay, but you can take that back another layer because that really has a cause too. And you go back and you go back and you go back. And the answer to all of it is that because that's how God made the world. He made the back. And the answer to all of it is that because that's how God made the world. He made the world. And so who's responsible for that genocide or that murder or your mom being a bitch?

Who's responsible? I think the crucifixion is God taking responsibility. Right. You know, I'm responsible. If you want somebody to hate, hate me. I want you to look up at my corpse hanging on the cross and then I want you to eat my flesh and drink my blood, which if you look at like ancient cultures, like primitive cultures or just where they had ritual sacrifice.

Don't threaten me with a good time. One of the things that I find that a lot of people who talk about ritual sacrifice and cannibalism, I did a whole series on this. I missed that, I can people who talk about ritual sacrifice and cannibalism, I did a whole series on this. I missed that, I can't wait to hear that. Is that they sort of talk their way around the aggressive and violent aspect of it. You know, say like Jordan Peterson has this explanation, which is very ingenious and very interesting,

and I think there's probably something to it that sacrifice, you like, it's sort of the the invention the psychological invention of the future it's um it's a recognition of the fact that if I give up something now that will cause a benefit like later on okay sure you're no longer just an impulsive animal who's reacting to things you can actually think ahead and take action now that's going to right and then the ultimate way of sort of making that real is to give up something valuable in order to achieve a benefit. And I think there's probably something interesting there for sure.

But you still have to answer the question of like, yeah, but they're killing their children. They're killing human beings. Sometimes if you look at the Aztecs and the Mayans, they would have their sacred ball game that they would play. It was only played by the sons of the highest nobility in their society. And the captain of the winning team got sacrificed at the end of the game.

That was his reward, right? And so you think, this is just evolutionarily speaking, in just totally contradictory. Like you're killing off some of your best people like for no real, for a symbolic purpose, I guess. And that aggressive aspect of it, I think bleeds over to like when you take communion and you're symbolically, it's a sublimation. This was something else that was just crazy to like Romans and others that like where

Christianity spreads, like what do you mean you're like... Transubstantiation, baby. Like we're still like holding, you know, throwing spears and like whatever and even we're over cannibalism. Like what do you mean you're cannibalizing your god, right? But cannibalism, like, if you look at the society... Meanwhile, the Romans were, like, fisting gorillas. They weren't exactly, like, you know what I mean?

They were saying that while they had gorilla fists in their butt holes. But cannibalism is, like... I don't know if that was really happening. I just watched Gladiator 2. They just seemed kind of like freaks. In the cultures that practiced it in a ritual way. So it was something that had social sanction That was yeah part of their part of their social system Sacrifice the the aggressive aspect of Human sacrifice and cannibalism is I mean, it's right out front

It's it's it's just plainly obvious that that's what's going on. And cannibalizing your enemy. If you think about it, we used to have, I think it was the Maori people, right? Would have this ritual where when their men would go off to war, they'd go off to battle, and then when they were coming back, before they got to the village, the priests would go out there and stop them and meet them. And the women priests would come out and start doing all of these incantations and spells to purge them of this curse that they

were bringing back with them. Even as the people in the town are celebrating their victory, everybody recognizes that there's something dangerous about these guys. They're carrying something in them now celebrating their victory, everybody recognizes that there's something dangerous about these guys. They're carrying something in them now that we have to purge them of before they can be readmitted to our society. So it takes days and they go through all of these things.

And I think that that's one example of it, but just overall, we have this idea that, I mean, if you want to talk, you talking about like the idea of punching someone back twice as hard That the problem with approaching things that way and everybody knows this who has who's done it who's carried You know who's acted on this impulse is that afterwards? There's this vague feeling That sometimes we don't elucidate or even recognize, but it's in there and that feeling is that somehow This is not over Like there's still something hanging out there and like maybe in you know

Like just the sort of literal sense, you know, it's like I killed a guy But now I got to worry about his brothers But like really it's like I've done something that like now there's a debt to be paid and it's hanging out there. And so how do you kind of close that loop and you see this in like very primitive cultures where their rituals are like they're not sublimated the way they are now. They're not symbolically cannibalizing somebody, they're actually cannibalizing somebody. And part of the civilizing process is really the, it's the progressive sublimation of these demands that we just have deep in our psychology, figuring out how to satisfy those symbolically rather than literally.

And so when God, you know, when we gaze up at His murdered, crucified corpse for an hour and a half in church, and we go through a holiday ritual and all of these things that are completely focused around this, and then we eat Him, we eat His flesh, you know. Even in the last... People read the Last Supper and they're like, oh, Jesus is telling him, like, you know, integrate me into your being, wherever. It's like, there might be some, all of that. I think what really like what's being said there is if you want somebody to hate,

I'm the guy, kill me. Eat my flesh. You know, just do the worst, most final thing. Imagine the highest act of aggression, you know, eat your enemy. I'm actually responsible for all of your suffering on some level, all of you, you know, including the devil, including Uday Hussein and Hitler, you know. And so if you want somebody to hate, don't hate them. Don't hate, because in a way, they're victims of this too. So hate me if you need somebody to hate. And that to me is like only, it answers the

question of like why Jesus couldn't just be just some guy who was an enlightened person who really kind of was just, you know, he understood like all of these things and so he had to be God. Because only God could be the person that could bear that, you know, could bear all that responsibility. Jesus, if he was just some saint, and if he was like, you know, I'm responsible for all of this, hate me, it's like, no, you're not. You're not really, you know, and but God can take that responsibility legitimately. And it's our way out of hating even our enemies. You can love even your enemy

if you sort of recognize that in a maybe long roundabout way, he's a victim of the same things that you're a victim of. Whoa! And that doesn't mean you don't execute a murderer. It just means when you pull the lever on the electric chair, you don't do it with hatred in your heart. And in fact, you do it with grief in your heart. And don't electrocute them too long, because you'll overcook them.

And then when you eat their flesh, it won't taste as good. Can you pull up, because it is Lent, we're almost out of Lent here, I know this, my wife's Catholic. Can you pull up Jesus in the Desert painting? You ever seen this painting? I'm sure I have. This is what I love about Jesus. And this is why I really will... This is what appeals to me about Christianity as opposed to other...

Yeah! This episode of the DTFH is brought to you by Hems. Let me show you something, friends. Can you see my bald spot, Josh? Look at that! Look at that! You know, I'm pretty sure that they sponsored me because of my hair. Is it kind of like, is what happens this could be you

This could be you and it is me and I love myself Let me tell you I sure would love a nice flowing head of hair. It's too late for me. It's a dry. It's forget it It's Chernobyl. It's Mars like I'd have to terraform my scalp I'd have to get Elon Musk to land on my scalp and put robots up there I don't know. It's just not gonna happen and I'm Fine with sort of fine with that. Look if you're starting to notice your hair thinning when you look in the mirror You're not alone Life just gets busier and busier and it can feel like there's not enough time in the day to do something about it

I felt like that. Now look at me. So try him's hair loss solutions. You can avoid jumping through a bunch of frustrating hoops and get access to treatment without even leaving your home. I could have done that. They didn't exist when this beautiful hair started. People would compliment me on my hair.

They'd say you have beautiful curly hair. Not anymore. Not anymore. Sometimes my kids will just look at it and go, what happened? Hems provides you with a convenient access to a range of hair loss treatments that work all from the comfort of your couch. Hems makes treating hair loss simple with doctor trusted options and clinically proven ingredients like finasteride and minoxidil that can regrow your hair in as little as three to six months. Choose from personalized, chewable, oral spray and serum treatments to find out what works best for you. The process is simple and 100% online, so there are no uncomfortable doctor visits.

Answer a few questions and a medical provider will determine if treatment is right for you. If prescribed, your treatment is sent directly to you for free. No insurance is needed. One low price covers everything from treatments to ongoing care. HMS has hundreds of thousands of trusted subscribers and they can help you get your confidence back too with visibly thicker and fuller hair. Or you could just do this. Just do this. Look at that.

Start your free online visit today at hems.com slash duncan. That's h-i-m-s dot com slash duncan for your personalized hair loss treatment options. hems.com slash Duncan. Results vary based on studies of topical and oral minoxidil and finasteride. Prescription products require an online consultation with a health care provider. Who will determine if a prescription is appropriate? Restrictions apply. See website for full details and important safety information. Do it for me. Do it for me. Do it for this old patch.

["Skyfall", by John Williams, playing in background with music playing.] Holy shit! This is my favorite Christian painting. Pull that up, man. Can you enlarge it? Look at this. It's on Amazon. It's only... look at that. Isn't that amazing? That's God! And look at that. Now, if you zoom... can you zoom in on that on his face? Because this painter, what's his name? Ivan Krimskoy,

captured two things... well, I see things in this. People see different things. One, this dude's been out in the desert. It sucks. He's starving. But then, if you look really closely, you see this, the cosmic smile. Inside of that is also built into that look of despair. I'm about, I'm going to have to die. I'm going to get beaten to death. I'm about, I'm gonna have to die.

I'm gonna get beaten to death. I'm gonna get crucified. This is bullshit. I'm out in the desert, nowhere to sleep, sleeping on rocks, used to be God. What the fuck did I do? Mixed into that is the human realization of the transcendent and the enlightened state

that's hiding behind all the despair. He captured the whole thing, man. That's an unbelievable painting. Isn't it unbelievable? And this is what I love. And so when I interpret The Last Supper, I don't see it the way you see it, though I love your interpretation. I see it as from a very human side, which is if we look at the experience of Jesus walking

around with these people, and you read, that's what got me with the book of John, is realizing like, whoever wrote this, their consciousness, the consciousness of what wrote this is non-standard, to put it lightly. The sense that with John as opposed to the other ones, we get the feeling maybe this person was there. And you can almost feel it in the writing. But the love, the love of this being and the love he had for those people. Last Supper, imagine this is the last time you're going to be hanging out with these people.

And to me, the thing that is so cheesy, I will tear up every time. It's he's saying, when you, just when you, it's really the sweetest thing you could say to your friends. When you drink wine, that's me. I'm not going anywhere. When you eat good food, that's me. I'll always be with you. I'm gonna be with you in these moments.

I'm going nowhere. It's a comforting moment to me. But also what I love about legitimate bona fide scripture is it's a fractal. It operates, the equation goes deep. Both of those things that you're talking about are combining there. You're talking about the enlightenment or the fusion of the Old Testament-style God, and it's intertwined with the human element that it's fusing with, and those two things are meeting at the Last Supper in this beautiful way, in a way that when you start really going deep into this, and that's how it lures you in, because it starts off by like, I think a lot of people come to Christianity by denying it.

They come to Christianity because like, this is bullshit, let me read this shit so I can tell my fucking Christian friend what a dumb piece of shit he is. And then you get sucked into the symbol setting, and I was like, whoa, it wasn't what I thought. So to me, that's what I see there is like, that's what I love about Jesus in the book of John they say the the The great moment wasn't the resurrection have you heard this before? It was the crucifixion the crucifixion was all after everything post crucifixion Who gives a fuck they're rising from the dead and all the stuff and Mel gives a movie that's coming out

I wonder where he's going with it. I, the last one kind of wrapped a bow around it. I don't think it needed a sequel! And I'll tell you, I got excited about that because I thought that it was Jesus' descent into hell. Now, I'm excited to see Mel Gibson's interpretation of hell and Jesus wandering through hell. But no, it doesn't appear to be that. It seems like it should just be like after the credits roll, the scene after credits roll. It just, I don't know, it's, you know, the he's like showing the holes in his hand and the lights beaming through it

and all that shit. It's interesting, you know, you mentioned kind of in passing how that was the last time that he was going to hang out with these guys. And, you know, the thing about that is... I mean, he was going to hang out with them one more time, you know, the thing about that is... I mean, he was gonna hang out with them one more time, you know what I mean? Sorry. Still too soon.

Heresy... But the reason that was the last time he was gonna hang out with them is because these men who had watched him feed thousands, had watched him heal the sick and the lame, they were all gonna abandon him. That's right. My maybe second favorite Christ painting now, but after you just showed me that one,

but is Hieronymus Bosch. Bosch is Christ. I haven't seen this. I'll bet you have. Just B-O-S-C-H, Christ Crucifixion, it'll come up. That's not even close to it. No one could spell Hieronymus. Hieronymus couldn't fucking spell it.

Imagine if that was your name. I know. Trying to get a reservation. B-O-S-E-H. Christ. Christ. I have not seen this. The second one.

Yeah, there you go, down. Right below on the left. Yeah. So this is the mob that is surrounding him. The second one yeah, there you go down Yeah Well, this is the this is the mob it's seen is surrounding him Oh shit as he's going to the to the cross right and you you know you look at that painting and you say You know where were these men who? Who yesterday were willing to die for him where Where the... Really, here's the crazy question. And as you say, where are the throngs of people who were waving palm fronds and welcoming him into Jerusalem one week before? And the scary answer is, they're right there. That's them.

Because that's what happens when the devil takes control of us, you know, the devil moves in crowds God speaks to us individually When I like I I was talking to my is that yours quote the devil moves in crowds I guess so that's the word that is the creepiest thing I ever heard. That's anytime. I'm having a bad trip That's the vibe I get man. Yeah, what the fuck that's so creepy a bad trip, that's the vibe I get, man. What the fuck, that's so creepy. Everybody's felt it. Every single human being has felt it

and knows exactly what I'm talking about when I say that. I was talking to my friend's little cousin, he's a young guy, not too long ago, and he asked me for a piece of advice, just like not on a given thing. He wanted just like a piece of advice. He likes the podcast and everything, he wants some advice. So I told him a story that you've heard the Easter episode and so you know the story.

I think I talked about it in there. When I was in high school, I was riding the bus to school and we're the troublemakers in the back shooting spitballs and paper airplanes and all that and we're the cool kids. And this was when I was staying with my grandparents up in Montana. And so we're on a bus ride that takes like an hour because they go around and pick everybody up from their farms and ranches and everything else.

And so the bus becomes like a social environment of its own, right? When you're on it two hours, three hours a day. And so one day we stop and it's a house we've never stopped at before. And this girl who's maybe a year younger than me, I think I was maybe a junior and she was a sophomore or something like that.

And her little brother who was maybe seven or something, get onto the bus. Nobody knows who these people are. And so they sit up at the front of the bus. They're obviously very shy. She's sitting with her little sibling. And people are asking in the back, like, who's this? Like, what's her name?

Like, what's going on? And you could see, like, just the house we stopped at and their clothes and stuff. This is not a wealthy family, you know? This is on the poorer side, right? Trailer, you know, double the wide they lived in and everything. And so they come on.

It's a 15-year-old girl and her seven, six-year-old little brother, And so they come on, it's a 15 year old girl and her seven, six year old little brother, right? God man, the story like... And people wanna know what her name is. And so somebody just gets up, some small ass goes up and says, hey, what's your name? And so she tells him and he yells back, it's Billy Joe. And somebody shouts out immediately, one of my friends shouts out

Billy Joe more like sloppy Joe and then immediately somebody follows that up with more like sloppy ho mmm, this is her first encounter with this place she's gonna spend the next several years back and You know, she kind of sinks down in her seat For the entire rest of the time. I was at that school with her, her name was Sloppy Ho. Yeah, right. And what you saw develop over time was she became it.

I pray. I literally have prayed about this a million times. Literally, I'm not saying it in a figurative way that I have prayed that she ended up alright because you could see it affect the development of this young girl's personality. Talking about a 15-year-old girl who comes to a new environment and is immediately just, you know, it just completely, that kind of thing can completely derail a person's life, you know?

And here's the worst part about it is I knew at the, and I've known every day, I never called her that, I was always trying to be nice to her and stuff, but I was part of the friend group that like, you know, had the assholes in it, and so she was always real standoffish with me, and I talked to like, I knew some people who were part of the friend group she became a part of, which was kind of the outcast kids, you know? And they would tell me, like, she's like the sweetest person. She was a bitch to everybody else, because of course, you know. And they would tell me like, she's like the sweetest person. Yeah. She was a bitch to everybody else, because of course, you know. And the thing that I've always thought about from that day forward, and this is what I told my buddies, you know, the young guy I was talking to. I said that I knew at the time that if I would have been like,

dude, shut the fuck up, that everybody would have stopped. Right. They wouldn't have kicked my ass. They wouldn't have turned on me or anything like that. Just me interjecting and being like, what are you doing? Would make those people be like, yeah, we're kind of being assholes. Hey, sorry, Billy Joe.

And it could have changed everything. But I was a coward. I didn't do it. And there were times, there know, there were other times and other situations where I stood up for a person like that and there were other times where I didn't. And I told the kid, I said, every single time that I pussed out, I still think about him almost every day.

And whatever the consequences that you bear for standing with that person at the time, whatever you're afraid of, whatever you think your friends are going to turn on you, whatever it is, it doesn't matter. None of that remotely compares to feeling the guilt of that for the next however long in your life, because I felt it for like 30 years. And it's not worth it.

Stand up for that girl. And whatever happens, you will not regret it. You will regret not doing it. Stand up for that girl. And whatever happens, you will not regret it. You will regret not doing it. And to me, like, that's the essence of the Christian message in a lot of ways. Never be a part of that crowd. In fact, be the one who, you know, refuses to go along. Don't be Peter. Don't be all the disciples who supposedly loved him so much but ran off at the first sign of trouble with only like a few women who actually stayed behind like at the foot of the cross, right? Like, don't be that. And again, like, they realized that later, you know, later on that they all got martyred because they kind of realized that like,

oh, we made a mistake there. We needed to stand up for him then. And now, you know, as this story is getting is getting sort of told in a way of this heretic and criminal was justly executed, we need to go stand for him now. And if that means that we're going to die with him, then that's like the ultimate act of holiness for us. And it's the ultimate example. And all of us in like our, you know, the smaller context of our own lives like you're not gonna get stoned to death You might get you know, you might get outcast you might get made fun of all that's that's martyrdom and you're gonna lose Twitter followers Thank you that was an incredible podcast, thank you so much. And thanks, Martyr Made Podcast. Anything else you want me to plug? No, I don't. I get uncomfortable with that stuff.

I'm not very good at self-promotion. All the links you need. It's the best podcast. I'm telling you guys, I have to listen to this. It's the most incredible podcast, as you can tell. Thank you for being on the show. I loved it. Thank you.

That was Darrell Cooper, everybody. Martyr Made Podcast. Subscribe. And don't forget to come see me in Denver April 19th. You can find all my comedy dates at DuncanTrussell.com and as always if you want commercial free episodes of this podcast just become, what is it a subscriber? Become a subscriber and you will get commercial free episodes. If you're listening to the podcast go to patreon.com forward slash DTFH and you can get commercial free episodes there. I gotta go. Bye