Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Pat Flynn on Politics, Memes, Religion, Logic, and More

Episode Date: August 23, 2019

This was supposed to be a podcast about kettlebells. Instead, it turned into a digression into politics, psychology, religion, and more, which let’s be honest, is more interesting than kettlebells. Pat is an interesting dude to talk to about this stuff, too, because while he’s certainly a fitness expert, he also has a master’s degree in systematic philosophy and has written several bestselling books, including How to Be Better At (Almost) Everything. In this interview, Pat and I go all over the place, pontificating on questions like . . . - How much do memes influence political elections? - What are the rational (and irrational) arguments for believing in God? - How seriously should we take “conspiracy theories”? - How do you make decisions when there are no good decisions? - What are the chances our lives are predetermined by fate? Not exactly the norm here on my podcast, but it was a fun excursion into some of the bigger questions about how the world around us works, and if you wonder about such things yourself, I think you’ll enjoy the interview as well. And if it’s not your kind of thing, don’t worry, Pat will be coming back on to talk kettlebells. 10:04 - Meme culture 14:27 - Humor as a marketing technique 16:36 - Jordan Peterson’s world view 28:54 - Persuasion technique 35:20 - The peg system memory technique 37:01 - 9/11, politics, and conspiracy theories 47:50 - The trolley problem and ethical experiments 52:01 - Nihilism versus relativism 1:02:13 - Transcendent dimensions 1:05:36 - Our world views and how they impact us 1:17:03 - Near death experiences 1:19:53 - Christianity, catholicism, and agnosticism 1:41:27 - Faith and free will Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: https://www.legionathletics.com/signup/

Hey, Mike here. And if you like what I'm doing on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider picking up one of my bestselling health and fitness books, including Bigger, Leaner, Stronger for Men, Thinner, Leaner, Stronger for Women, my flexible dieting cookbook, The Shredded Chef, and my 100% practical and hands-on blueprint for personal transformation inside and outside of the gym, The Little Black Book of Workout Motivation. Now, these books have sold well over 1 million copies and have helped thousands of people build their best bodies ever. And you can find them on all major online retailers like Audible, Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and Google Play, as well as in select Barnes and Noble stores. Again, that's Bigger Leaner Stronger for Men, Thinner Leaner Stronger for Women, The Shredded Chef, and The Little Black Book of Workout Motivation. Oh, and I should also mention that you can get any of the audiobooks 100% free when you sign up for an Audible account, which is the perfect way to make those pockets of downtime,

like commuting, meal prepping, and cleaning, more interesting, entertaining, and productive. So if you want to take Audible up on that offer, and if you want to get one of my audio books for free, go to www.legionathletics.com slash Audible. That's L-E-G-I-O-N athletics slash A-U-D-I-B-L-E, and sign up for your account. Hello, hello, and welcome to the Most For Life podcast. I am Mike Matthews, and this one was actually supposed to be about kettlebells. That was what we planned to talk about, but instead we digressed early on, and it turned into a meandering but hopefully interesting and entertaining discussion about politics, psychology, religion, and other weighty topics, which let's be honest is kind of

more interesting than Kettlebells, at least I thought so, or Pat and I both thought so. And Pat is actually an interesting dude to talk to about this stuff because while he is certainly a fitness expert and particularly a kettlebell expert, he also has a master's degree in systematic philosophy and he has written several best-selling books, including his most recent called How to Be Better at Almost Everything. And in this interview, Pat and I go all over the place and pontificate on questions like, how much do memes influence our culture and our politics? What are some of the common rational and irrational arguments for the existence of God, how to think better about quote-unquote conspiracy theories, how to think about making decisions

when there are no clear good decisions to make, what are the chances that our lives are just predetermined by fate, the old predestination idea, and other such things? Now, I know this kind of stuff is not exactly the norm here on my podcast, but it was a fun excursion nonetheless into some of the bigger questions about how the world around us works. And if you ever wonder about such things yourself, then I think you're going to enjoy the interview, hopefully as much as I did. And if not, if it's not your kind of thing, don't worry. Most of my programming will, of course, be health and fitness related. And I am going to have Pat back on for that kettlebell podcast

because he can also teach you how to put together some pretty killer kettlebell workouts. All righty, let's get to the interview. Mr. Flynn. But I can't even speak today. Mr. Flynn. Hello. I was thinking it. So I was like about to say your name and then I was going to say mein Freund and then I was going to make a joke about speaking German.

And these days that means I'm a Nazi. And then I got ahead of myself. You know and then I was going to make a joke about speaking German. And these days that means I'm a Nazi. And then I got ahead of myself. You know what I mean? Oh, all right. So we're already there with the conversation. Usually I'm the one who's baffling introduction. So it's good to have someone else kicking this off. Mike Matthews, it's good to be here. Yes, sir. So we are here to talk about not me being a Nazi or supposed Nazi because I know how to speak German. Well, as interesting as a cultural and political discussion might be, I'm not ready for that yet. I'm not ready to jump into the deep end. You know what I mean? I still have my floaties on. Yeah, we have to warm up. Yeah, we have to warm up. with what people generally agree with. And in some ways we wouldn't, but I do think we would do a good job at least explaining why we feel the way we feel about it.

Could you organize that? Because I think that would be a lot of fun. I'll make a note. I mean, I've spoken to each of them individually. And again, I think if we came into it with just an outline of the things we want to discuss and be able to actually explain our rationale for feeling the way we feel about certain things. I think it could be for a fun discussion. I think it would be fruitful. I think it would also be probably enlightening for people

who are somewhat on the outside to realize that there's actually people in the fitness industry who aren't extremely far left. Yeah. And also that have well-reasoned positions. And, you know, like one of the things I just get amused by every time. So on Instagram, sometimes I'll make, they're not political posts, but there's just some stuff that is so clown world-ish. It's so ridiculous that I just post the stories and laugh about it. Right. Um, like there was one recently where it was, uh, ill, what's her name? Ilhan, uh, Omar. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, where she was saying that people should be fearful of white men in America, basically. And stuff like that. And it's just laughable. Explain that. Because when I go and consult, for example, the FBI crime statistics, they don't exactly agree. I don't know. I'm not very afraid of random white people.

Well, first off, I love that you said you weren't ready for it. And now here we are. True, true. And then so but then so here's the reply, though. So people this is if I and these are, again, lighthearted jokes. And I don't I don't go after people personally. I actually don't really care what people in a sense of like, I'm not going to hold it against someone if they are left

politically or right politically or even far left. I mean, I think there are definitely ideas themselves, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum that I do not agree with. And some of them are far left and some of them are, would be considered far right as well, of course. But a common reply I'll get one or two, whenever I make a post like that is someone like, just stick to fitness, man. We don't need to hear about your thoughts on politics. Or I would go to you for muscle building advice, not political advice. Right? Yeah. And it's just classic ad hominem. Exactly. And people throw that out to celebrities too. And the truth is, is okay. Most celebrities, most of the things they say seem pretty uninformed, but a good argument is a good

argument. It doesn't matter who it's coming from. So you have to be willing to address the arguments, not just attack the person they're coming from. And it's just, it's just lazy. It's kind of a way of, of hand-waving or dismissing something that's clearly agitated you. Yeah. But it's not, it's not advancing the conversation in any meaningful direction. Yeah. But it's not, it's not advancing the conversation in any meaningful direction. Yeah. Yeah. And that, that's my response. I'm just like, eh, standard ad hominem, usually coming from leftists, like tiresome, weird

way to think. And then, and then, and then actually more often than not, uh, like the last person who did it was like, well, how acquainted are you with uh you know marx's theories what have you read well i read manifesto oh did you read capital no and then he actually engaged in a little bit of a discussion so so props to him but um anyway and that's good well it's funny because for me it could be it should be the opposite right when i start talking philosophy or economics that's where my formal education is. So people should be saying, stick to philosophy and economics and shut up about

fitness. But most people know me as a fitness guy. So it's the same sort of dismissals that you receive. Yeah. Yeah. But as you are formally educated in those fields, that's a quick stafu. That's a quick retort. Like, well, who are you? Why should I care what you have to say about philosophy? You're like, well, I kind of spent a lot of time studying and thinking about this stuff. But even that, you know, you switch from kind of an ad hominem to appeal to authority. Okay, there might be some credibility there, but has it been demonstrated? Because there's no shortage of people with degrees in any kind of fields, PhDs after the name that just honestly don't know what the heck

they're talking about. So we need to see what the arguments are. We need to look at the arguments and just get away from the people. And the way our culture is right now is it just people seem unable, completely unable to do that. I mean, just, just all rational discourse has just been blown completely out of the window. And it's really a shame, you know I mean, just, just all rational discourse has just been blown completely out of the window. And it's really a shame, you know, things have just, I'm like, look, I love memes. Memes are often hilarious, but meme culture definitely doesn't help with the conversation. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, I think, yeah, no, I mean, I would, I would agree. I would agree if that's like the extent of someone's understanding is what they have gleaned from

memes. But what I like about memes is it allows you to very easily and effectively communicate just a single idea in a way that anyone can understand. And especially if you're pointing out hypocrisies, I mean, those are, those are generally the ones that, that I find the funniest. If we're talking about, you know, politics and culture are the ones that just point out the obvious absurdities in a way that makes you laugh. Like those are powerful. Yeah. So as conversation starters, I think memes can, can be really interesting and provocative. But there's the other side of it, too, is how many conversations do they really start versus how many flame wars? You know what I mean?

They have a persuasive power, though. I mean, I feel like what was this? There was a study on this, actually. There was a study on the effectiveness of memeing, if you can even use that as a verb. the effectiveness of meaning, if you can even use that as a verb. And I remember the headline being that basically conservative memes, this was, they were looking specifically at the 2016 election. Conservative memes did, pro-Trump memes did way, way better than pro-Hillary memes. And so- That doesn't surprise me. Yeah. And then, so from that, a meme was born that the left can't meme. And yeah, and and I understand, actually, me having definitely, I would say I would use the word conservative bias, but I'm going to say that I think modern what now passes for, quote unquote, conservatism is these days is conservatism does not strive to conserve. I think that are the problems that we

have are much deeper than that. And, you know, I often say, fuck the Democrats and fuck the Republicans too. And I have different reasons for saying, you know, I've, I dislike the Democrats generally. I dislike the party and the platform for different reasons than I dislike the GOP. But in my eyes, it's about fuck them equally, actually. I mean, currently, maybe I disagree with a bit more that the Democrats are doing for obvious reasons, but I would not consider myself a Republican. So with that being said, I have my ideas, some of my ideas, or if I had to weigh all of my values, I guess, as far as politics and culture goes, I would skew a bit more right. And I have an obvious bias there, but I will say that I think it's pretty clear to anyone, if you just take a sampling of anti-left versus anti-right memes, the anti-left

memes are generally just better. They're generally just, they're funnier, they're wittier. They're oftentimes more biting, like really getting to the crux of a matter in a way that is- The heart of the hypocrisy. Totally. Totally, totally. Yeah. And I agree with that. And wow, a lot to unpack there. I mean, I'm with you in our last conversation, we kind of dove into this a little bit. It's all about those fundamental principles you're working from. And I would have views that would agitate certain people who consider themselves staunchly conservative in the American context. And I have probably a

lot more views that would certainly agitate people who consider themselves classically liberal or leftist as well. As for memes, I mean, think of kind of what the possible choices of audiences are, right? You're going to have people who are, you know, they're receptive and they could be more or less receptive, but they're open to being persuaded. You're going to have people that are indifferent and then you're going to have people that are either actively or passively hostile. And I think that's where I think the point you're making is totally valid where the memes, especially if they're funnier, right. As, as memes from conservative audiences tend to be, they will probably have more of an influence on,

on the, on any audience segment that isn't actively or passively hostile. Yep. For sure. I can totally see that. Yeah. I totally agree. And just, just, you know, even from a marketing standpoint, humor is powerful. If you can make someone laugh, whatever your message is, is going to just be more palatable. They're going to be more open to it. Philosophers hate comedians because the hardest person to debate is somebody that's funny. And it's not because they necessarily have good audiences. It's just because the power of laughter is so inherently persuasive. It just makes people like you. So the thing that, and I think I've got a good sense of humor, so hopefully I've got a nice balance here. But honestly, the toughest people to argue with are just snappy, witty

people. And it has nothing to do with the quality of their arguments. Sometimes their arguments are pretty bad, but they've got a good witticism, you know? So what you say is absolutely true. And that all goes back to Aristotle's rhetoric of understanding how to get people to like you, appealing to the emotions, and then kind of pushing the rest through with logic. There's a sort of hierarchy of persuasion that goes on. So it's not just the matter of what you say, but the manner how you present it from a pure persuasion standpoint is hugely important. So that study totally, completely makes sense to me that the rights memes would have more of an influence than the lack. Yeah. Yeah. And that was the conclusion

was in the 2016 election, they did by, I forget, it was a huge factor too. And probably did play something of a role in Trump's win. Oh, I think so. I think, I mean, I certainly, and I don't think you would do this either, but people always try to reduce it to one or two things, but there's such a confluence of conditions and causes that went into that mess of an election. But it's like, man, it's so interesting to even try and analyze it. But everything back from like, I'm kind of into video games, so Gamergate, I don't know if you remember that, was really interesting. And to see how that kind of unfolded out into the larger culture and the whole kind of exposure of the menace of political correctness and people coming to terms with that and just kind of watching this development from a sub-segment of culture out into the larger folds was really interesting to me.

The phenomenon of Jordan Peterson very much along those lines. Yep. I don't even, I kind of stopped paying attention actually to him months ago because there were just a number of things that I didn't like where he was going with his, just his general messaging, his personal brand. But in the beginning, I agreed with a lot of what he had to say. And of course, it all started with political correctness. Yeah, I wrote an article for him recently for a website, and I certainly have a number of critiques on his kind of worldview. But as a cultural figure, he cannot be ignored. I mean, he's hugely significant and significant in the sense that he kind of takes people who might otherwise be kind of leaning left and turns them completely around, right?

kind of leaning left and turns them completely around, right? The people who are about to enter into that sort of locked in passively or actively hostile phase, you know? And he speaks really well to young jaded men. Yeah. And personally, I still admire what he's done and I still actually appreciate, I think he's very much in that positive, at least as of a couple months ago when I was, that's when I stopped paying too much attention. Previously, I was, I listened to a lot of his lectures, his biblical series, some of his interviews. And ironically, I actually didn't read his book because I was around the point where I was starting to lose interest. And just before anybody, because I know there might be a number of Peterson fans. When I say the fallacies of Peterson, I like Peterson. I think he's a good guy with good intentions from what I can tell.

But I think he's just got a kind of jumbled up philosophical worldview. So I don't mean that as an attack on him. I mean, he's a pretty hardcore Jungian, right? And I think that there's problems with that, even when he takes it into his biblical series, interestingly enough. Or it can't be reduced to that. So that might be, if people are interested, interesting starting point, if we have that conversation. are, I think, very important that he dismisses. Just for example, he has, of course, spoken a lot about the dangers of identity politics, but has extended that a bit further to where... And yes, he has, I think, saved a lot of people from going hard left, communism left and brought them back to somewhere at least reasonably in the center. But he also has openly said that he is very afraid of a far

right movement rising in response to the far left movement that is blossoming all around us, which I understand. But so more along those lines, for example, he was saying that you basically, that we as, as, you know, as white people, we shouldn't be proud of any of our ancestors achievements. And we shouldn't feel a kinship with our ancestors or with our, with our race, because we didn't achieve that. That has no bearing on our lives and it's no reflection upon us. And so that's a specific thing that I completely disagree with. And I think that's an important, having a shared heritage and having an awareness of the achievements of your ancestors, I think can be very healthy in that

it gives you something to aspire to. It makes you immediately feel like you are part of something bigger than yourself. And of course, yeah, if you personally in some way have convinced yourself that you can personally take credit for something a distant ancestor did, that's silly, but that's not what people, that's not how that, that's almost a straw man type of did. That's silly, but that's not what people, that's not how that, that's a, almost a straw man type of situation. That's not what people do. Of course, that's not the actual practical effect of that. The practical effect is, uh, you can be proud in the achievements of your, of your race and want to maybe add something to that, to the benefit of, of all, right? Not to just the benefit of your race. And that's just an example of something that I disagree with. And if that was the only thing,

of course, I wouldn't be at a point where I don't pay that much attention to Jordan Peterson anymore. But there are just a number of things like that. It has that emotional effect on me where I'm just less excited about him and what he has to say. Yeah, I get it. And I actually wouldn't have much to effect on me where I'm like, I'm just less excited about him and what he has to say. Yeah, I get it. And, and I actually wouldn't have much to say on that because I'm coming from a different angle. You know, my master's program is in systematic philosophy, so it's all about worldview. So I'm always interested in people's worldview, how they arrive at it. Is it consistent? Is it coherent? And that's where I think he has the biggest difficulties, what he has to say on culture and economics and politics, I'm actually less interested

in than I am in his more kind of academic work and his published work. His statements on, say, identity politics is interesting too, because even when you analyze it, everything is actually identity politics. People are being appealed to on identity on some level, even if that level is ideas. So you can't even really escape identity politics. People are being appealed to on identity on some level, even if that level is ideas. So you can't even really escape identity politics, but you get what he's saying in that it's sort of been perverted by the left. And really brought to the forefront in a grotesque way. Yeah, exactly. So, okay. All right. On a superficial level and certainly on a general level, when he says things like, hey, take personal responsibility, clean your room. All that is great stuff. Don't get me wrong.

Like, I know, you know, I spoke to him. Uh, so back when he launched his Patreon, I signed up for the, I think it was a couple hundred dollars a month. And one of the perks was you get a 45 minute Skype call with him. And so on that call, we ended up actually just talking, he was just asking like basically who I am and what am I, what do I do? Like, you know, and I got talked about a bit about books. And so, uh, I had mentioned to him that I actually emailed him before he released his book because I was telling him, dude, you need to name your book, clean your room. Like you need to take your current title and make it a subtitle. The clean, clean, no, seriously, clean your room is a meme. Now you own that phrase. And I gave him the example. I was like, look at the book, make clean, clean, no, seriously, clean your room is a meme. Now you own that phrase.

And I gave him the example. I was like, look at the book, make your, make your bed by, um, the, the Navy guy that I, McRaven, right. Super bestselling book. And it's a good title. It's simple. It evokes some curiosity. Like what, what, you know, why it's such a simple thing. Why, why is he telling me to make my bed? What does he mean? You know what I mean? And so clean your room would be Jordan Peterson's version of that. And, um, and it's funny. So when I, when I was, when I was telling him that he was like, he agreed, he was like, oh yeah, yeah, that would have been, that would have been actually a really good title. And so afterward, he tweeted out McRaven's book and then, and then question, and then it was like, or clean your room, right?

First cap, like as a title question mark. And a number of people replied, you're, you, you need to write, that needs to be your next book. It needs to be called clean your room. Oh, I completely agree. And, and Peterson, I guess, I guess he can't be faulted for not being a marketer. I know. I know. Yeah, totally. I tried to get ahold of him beforehand, but at that point he already, it was just so swamped that it just obviously never, he never saw it. I tried to get like message him, put something through on Patreon. He just never saw it. like right before he just exploded into celebrity. And I was actually, he was on my list of people before that happened that I was going to invite on my podcast, but he just like, for whatever reason, I just never did it.

And now of course I'm like kicking myself, right? Because, and I have gotten people like that. One of my earliest interviews was with Tim Ferriss. Now I can't reach that guy at all. So that was, which book was it was i was part of his launch team for the four hour a chef one and uh yeah we did an interview we were you know kind of and he was he was definitely really well known then but he was still somewhat reachable yeah not anymore so i i totally blew it with the peterson because you know i would have actually loved to have sit down and

had a conversation like this with him about the questions that I wish everybody asked. Everybody else would ask him, but aren't, but that's probably not going to happen at this point. Unless I somehow blow into celebrity, which with this podcast, Mike, you might just help me do. This could be it. Lightning.

This is the lightning in the bottle right here. This is it. Well, you only need that like one thing, right? Like, like all these need that like one thing, right? Like, like all these people had that one thing. Like Peterson's one thing was the whole showdown with political correctness at his university. Like,

uh, who else? Uh, Ben Shapiro was the, the Piers Morgan thing, right? They had, nobody really knew these guys before.

And then they had that one thing that just blew up. Now, of course they were preparing, right. Uh, and, and being educated and putting out, you know, they're, they course they were preparing, right. Uh, and, and being educated and putting out, you know, they're, they're really smart people who, who can, who should

be recognized. They were ready for it. It's almost like they threw through just many years of hard work and which also doubled, of course, as preparation, they finally quote unquote got lucky, but you know, that was, let's, let's look at it though. That was after a lot of instances of, of getting unlucky in a sense. I mean, look at yourself, right? Like how many, how many opportunities are we missing every day? How many instances, uh, was it someone where someone was maybe going to reach out to us with something and they didn't, or if we would have just been in a certain place at a certain time, you know what I mean? So you can look at it then of, uh, so they just kept on working though. They just kept on going. And

I think it's like, it's just one of those, one of those little cheesy quotes, right? You make your own luck by just continuing to work, but there's a truth in that. There is. And that's why those cliches resonate because it's speaking to something that is true, or at least very close to true. And you can't just plop luck on somebody who's unprepared. That's your class. Then you'll have your 15 minutes of fame and then you'll completely fade away. But for these people, it was okay. Constant grind, hustle. I'm working really hard. And then, you know, you keep, you keep taking swings at the bat. Eventually you might actually hit something. Yeah. Like my, uh, I'm not, what I'm not saying, what I'm not saying is that they just got lucky

because I don't buy that at all. There was certainly luck, meeting, preparation, et cetera, whatever, that kind of launched them to where they are now. Funny enough, a friend of mine, after 9-11, it was, I don't know, sometime after, a couple months after, there was, remember that documentary, Loose Change? No. So it was a documentary that was basically trying to make the case that it was an inside job right it was one of the first ones and and it got heavily criticized of course and validly in some some of the points you know stood uh some scrutiny and some of the points they were making did not right and um but anyways at the time a buddy of mine who was a smart dude um just just yeah high

iq read a lot researched a lot somebody whose opinion like if he were to tell me something i wouldn't just dismiss it i know that he's looked into it right and so uh he had brought up he's like hey you know so i watched this documentary lose change then i went and there might have been a i don't know if there was a book out yet but he had looked into as many things at that time as the, the, there was available in terms of some of the anomalies, just in the official story. Some of the things you're just like, what, how does that work exactly? And he was like, yeah, I don't know if it was an inside job per se, but it's interesting. Some of these things really don't make sense. Like they're, and, and the, the, the counter argument to them, they don don't make sense so they're unresolved

right and and so at that time is that's when i was like oh that sounds interesting and started looking into that stuff myself and that's when i came across alex jones and and uh initially i was just like this guy's hilarious he's a he's a great he's just a he's a great performer um he's a character i've seen of course like the memes of him and him shouting and gyrating and all his antics and all that. So I'm familiar with that. Exactly. So then that was my first impression. And fast forward to today, I would say that in many ways, I think he's been vindicated in at least in like, he's had his guns probably pointed in the right direction for a long time. He's just not very accurate. It's like, you know, old artillery that just blows all over the place.

And sometimes he hits a target and sometimes he doesn't. Sure. Well, people say the same thing about Trump, right? It's like, clearly he's not telling the truth on a lot of the details, but Scott Adams says, well, he's not trying to do that. He's trying to be persuasive. So he says things that are directionally true in the vague direction of things that people might be able to find truth in that way. Right. That's a, that's a, that's an interesting way to put it. I saw it's a persuasive technique. So, so if you try to understand Trump as a philosopher, you're always going, and this is what I tell my philosopher friends that who are in there, like, I'm like, you're just looking at him the wrong way. Like, you have to see him as a marketer, which is my other hat, right? As a marketer, and somebody who is in the game of persuasion. And once you see him that way, he actually starts to begin to make a lot more sense. But if you're looking at him as through sort of an analytic lens, you're just always going to be finding, you know, things that he's stumbling over these inconsistent with and, and, and whatever. And, and like, rightfully so, right. There's many things that he says and does or implements that I

would have issues with. But I think if you're trying to understand where he's coming from, then you have to understand that his background is in marketing and persuasion. Even, even why, where he repeats himself over and over and over, that may just be a verbal tick, but it's also a persuasion technique. Repetition has power. I mean, repetition is one of the fundamental principles of advertising. I mean, why do you think Geico makes silly commercials with a gecko? They just, actually, the purpose of those commercials is not to try to get us to run over to Geico.com and sign up. I mean, sure, they would love that. They usually, if I'm remembering correctly, have a simple call to action if you're in the mood to do it right now. But they know that most people are not. Most people are not going to see the Geico gecko and then be like, oh, let me just go change my insurance right now. What they want though is, and this is, again, you read any classic book on advertising and you'll come across this in all of them really,

is this point of repetition and the power of repetition. Because if you, me, all of us, this works on all of us, the more we've heard something, the easier it is to recall it to mind heard or seen right and so so what these companies want is they want when when we let's say geico right so um we've seen geico or we know the geico and we're sitting at our desk one day we're going to pay our insurance bill and it just went up we're like what the fuck is this and then now we're like i'm gonna go get i'm gonna i'm with uh you know allstate and i'm gonna go see what else is out there at that moment. They want us to think Geico. They want us to think, Oh, I'm going to go to Geico and check it out.

And top of mind alert. And that's the key. And, and Trump know, of course he knows this. And if, and, and like, none of this is either an endorsement or, um, issuing a disapproval. It's just trying to understand him. And whether you like him or you don't like him, whether you want to be elected or not elected, you should at least try to understand him. And people just don't seem to be able to see him through this perspective. And it makes perfect sense. And it's not just repetition. It's not just sort of directional

truths, but it's also exaggeration and hyperbole. Like what sticks in your head more than things that have been grossly exaggerated? Trump knows this. He knows it. Now, whether that's morally justified, whether that's ethical to do, those are completely separate questions. Interesting questions, good questions, important questions. But just on the level of trying to understand Trump, you have to see him as what he is. He's a marketer. And there's another advertising principle, vivid images generally sell better than blase images. And that's even a- Hence the wall rather than border security. And that's a perfect example of it. And that's also a memory technique. You'll read any book on read Kevin Horsley's book. That's like one of the, what is it? Unlimited memory or something.

I always see it on Amazon's. That book sells so well. I'm actually impressed, but it's a basic memory technique is if you want to use it, you want to use images and, and make them vivid, exaggerate them. So like, if you want to remember a list of 10 things, this is actually kind of fun to do. You should try people. If you've, you've maybe tried it, Pat, but anybody who's listening, who hasn't tried it. It's called the pagan link mnemonic system. I have, I haven't heard it, uh, under, under that, uh, name, but, um, anyways, you have

a list of, let's say 10 things. And if you turn them into a sequence of almost like a movie in your mind of vivid images, exaggerate things about them. almost like a movie in your mind of vivid images, exaggerate things about them. It could be like lurid colors or crazy proportions. But if you can turn the list of, I mean, you could do it with more than 10, actually, both states 10. If you turn that into just a little movie, so let's say I have my wallet on my desk and I have a book on my desk. So if those are the two items, wallet and book, I would first see my wallet and I have a book on my desk. So if those are the two items, wallet and book, I would first see my wallet and I might make it bright. I'm doing it in my mind right now,

bright green, right? And it's glowing. And now a book falls on a big book and smashes it violently and the cracks in the concrete ripple out. Okay. And then I work in the next thing, which might be my phone. And so then my phone might then break up through the ground through these things, right? So you build this vivid, exaggerated movie in your mind, go through it. I mean, when you get good at it, you can just do it in one pass actually. Yeah. It's great for gross. That's actually a little different than the peg and link system, but it's a good one. Yep. So, so, but now what you can do is what is you, if you now just run through that movie

in your head and you're like, Oh, wallet, book, phone, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then where it gets impressive to people is you can go the other way around. Now just play the movie in reverse. Ah, now you can go from 10 up to one, or you can tell people, all right, just, just tell me, uh, where do you want me to start? And they'd be like, Oh, start it, um, at, at the model plane, right? Start at number seven and go to down to number 10. You can just fast forward to that in your mind and go down to number 10, or they could say the other way. They could be like, Oh, start at number seven and go back up to number one, uh, backward. And, and you're just,

you're just using images. So, uh, anyway, my point is vividity and exaggeration. Like those are just the standard you do that because those are the images that really tend to stick in your memory. And of course then, so when you're speaking, yes, if the more vivid of a picture you can create in people's minds, the better you're going to sell. And that's a copywriting principle as well. Yeah. So just to give people, I'm not a memory expert by any means, but these little things, even if you don't master it, these little things can be really helpful. The peg and link is where you just put a sort of a qualitative dimension to the quantitative. So you have a list of one to 10, right? And then you sort of create a peg for each number that's an image. So for one, maybe you have

this image, it's carrot. Carrot always means one. Then what you do is you then link to the pegs, the various things you need to remember for one. So if you have a one to 10 grocery list, one is a carrot, then whatever your first item on the grocery list is, you make a movie between that thing and the carrot. So it actually builds on what you just outlined. I like that. That's useful. Versatile. Yeah. Look at that. We got to our first practical tip of the conversation. Well, we're already 34 minutes in. So this is actually what the conversation is going to be. We were going to talk about kettlebells, but, you know, we're more exciting. Yeah. It's Bill O'Reilly. Fuck it. We're doing it live. We're doing it live.

We're doing it live. We're doing it live. Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. So if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it. It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say thank you. You can find me on Instagram at Muscle for Life Fitness, Twitter at

Muscle for Life, and Facebook at Muscle for Life Fitness. Well, just you brought up 9-11. That's funny because that was a big turning point for me too. And like everybody, you know, like there's certain memories in your life and everybody knows where they were when 9-11 happened. You know, I was in the classroom. They put it on television. Of course, the parents all freaked out that they let the kids kind of see it all go down. But, you know, that sparked my interest in politics too.

And then it was actually politics and trying to answer like difficult political questions that I couldn't answer in the political domain alone that eventually drove me to philosophy. So we kind of have a similar starting point, I think, with that very obviously traumatic event of 9-11. And that it's just one of those things, you know, and I was pretty young at the time that, you know, you kind of, for me anyways, I was in a, not a completely sheltered world, but you just didn't imagine, you know, too much outside of what was going on in, you know, middle school. And then something like that happens, it just wakes you up and you just start asking all these

questions and searching around and trying to figure things out. So that was, that was definitely a kicking off point for, for me and my sort of intellectual searching as well. Yeah, you know, what gets me about 9-11 is when you have people who can't even entertain the idea that maybe the government was involved in some way or maybe had advanced set information that they ignored or even in the extreme would allow something like that to happen. That's a dangerous way to think because a cursory review of history, and I've spoken on this a number of times, is it becomes immediately clear that we have basically a never ending series of major conspiracies that have from a very powerful people who just want to stay powerful, destroy their enemies, become more powerful and working secretly behind the scenes to do those things. And, you know, the, the downstream effects are a lot of the major events of history. So to think that's just human nature. I mean, it's not even something to get

upset about, but now to think that like, oh, that doesn't happen anymore. No, no, no, no. They would never, you know, our government would just, would just never do that as people now. Yeah, it couldn't happen in America per se. Yeah, we're just, yeah, we're better. It's Americans. We've evolved beyond that. The, we have really pushed human nature, you know, beyond that. And it just, it just, you know, there aren't people who would do that anymore. Oh, but there are Jeffrey Epstein's out there who would rape kids and who do who know what's up, but, but, but not, you know, let a couple thousand people die to, to start a trillion plus dollar war that is going to enrich a lot of people and also keep a lot of people in their current positions of power. As somebody who doesn't really, who has not sufficiently investigated that and remains,

you know, I don't want to say agnostic on it, but I just, I couldn't add anything intelligent to that either. But, but what I do know about principles of reasoning and thinking, right? So in science, as well as philosophy, we have this device called inference to the best explanation, right? And the, and, and the idea is, especially as you mentioned, as you go through history and you see that there are very clear periods where government institutions will deliberately stage things to gain support for themselves and in especially evil and wicked ways. Now, now, now that you know that that is a data point and that, that, that can and has and does happen, you then just have to sit

around and try and gather the data and evidence and say, does, what is the inference here from, from what happened at nine? I'm not, I'm not saying that I've made one, but I'm just saying it shouldn't be off the table like you're saying. Now, I would say if you were to press me, I'd say I think that the best inference is that it is a very complicated one, that what seems to happen probably did happen, but it's probably more complicated nuance that there probably was some missed information or more things could have been done. But there's other deeper layers of asking questions. Well, why did it even happen to begin with? Why would somebody want to fly a plane into one of our buildings? And that was the questions I answered. Why would somebody ever want to do this to us? Aren't we America? Aren't we the greatest, freest country? Who could hate us

so much to want to do something like that? Well, these days, a lot of them are just kind of walking around Portland and Los Angeles in terms of hating us, whether they'd be willing to give their lives to harm us. I don't know. But you have that more so now than any time in my lifetime. Right. And there's also Occam's rule that the simplest explanation, all else equals is generally the best explanation. But that doesn't mean that a more complex explanation can't be true. It just says all else equal, we should prefer the simplest explanation. So we can actually use principles

of reasoning, principles of philosophy, principles of science to kind of look at this. And that's actually how historical sciences generally work. They go and they gather a pool of data, and then they try to make an inference to what they think the best explanation is in terms of explanatory scope, power, degree of ad hocness, and et cetera. Again, to the specifics of that, I can't really speak, but just maybe it can be just like when you're thinking about anything historically, you should be taking these principles of reasoning and tools into the investigation and say, okay, well, what best explains this? And if you don't know, maybe you're missing some data, maybe you need to do more investigations, but you certainly, it's not a healthy mindset to just assume what

you've told is automatically correct. And to be afraid of, and at least not be aware that, is it just that you're afraid that maybe your government could be capable of such a thing? And that's an understandable. There's no shame in that. That's understandable. Yeah, I would admit that that terrifies me. Like that does scare me. But look, just because something is scary doesn't mean that it isn't true.

And vice versa, right? Just because something is pleasant or makes you happy doesn't mean that it isn't true. We just have to look at when is it supported by the evidence or isn't it? So it's an interesting thing. I think it actually invites a, aside from the details, I'll let, you know, other people make those specific arguments, but it should, it should tell us something about how we should go about asking questions and finding answers. And that is always a valuable exercise. And it's also, it's not hard to, especially with something like that, that was some time ago now, and quite a few books have been written. There's a lot of work that's been done on both sides of the argument. It's not hard

at this point to pick up a couple of those books and come to your own conclusion and just go, okay, I want to understand the best arguments for 9-11 was an inside job. Okay. Now I want to understand the best arguments against 9-11 was an inside job. Okay. Now I want to understand the best arguments against 9-11 was an inside job. Okay. And I'm going to now go through these and come to my own conclusion. And which argument carries more weight for me? Where do I feel the weight of the evidence is? And historical data points would be, of course, a point that those would be in the argument for. If you want, anyone listening, go look up Operation Northwoods. You might've heard of that. It's on archive.gov. And you can see the minutes of the Joint Chiefs of Staff spitballing fake terrorism

events, like ideas for, as a pretext to invade Cuba. And one of them did involve shooting down a plane and it was going to be full of, so you're gonna have a plane full of whatever was going to happen. This was shot down by GFK, by the way, it was presented to him and he shot it down. Uh, it was going to be, if I remember correctly, it was as many years ago, so I may get details wrong, but this is the gist is there was a plane. It was going to be full of CIA, um, that of course nobody would know, but it was, these are all, they're all going to be CIA, all the, all the supposed I remember correctly, the plane was going to take off. It was then going to land. Everyone was going to get off the plane.

It was then going to be flown by remote over the ocean, I believe, and then be shot down with a missile. And then they were going to blame that on Cuba. That was one of the just proposed scenarios. Hey, we could do this. And then we could use that to rile up all the American people. And then we could invade Cuba. There was another one. I remember to blow up astronauts. That was another one. You know, there was going to be a seriously it's in there and there were

like five or six of these scenarios. So they were serious about this. Again, this was, this was presented to JFK and he's the one who said, no, we're, we're not doing that. But what if he would have been a Lyndon Johnson who got us into Vietnam and the Gulf of Tonkin? Go look into Gulf of Tonkin as well. And you realize that of those two attacks, we now know one didn't even happen. And there were some oddities with the attack that did happen. And so if it were Lyndon Johnson, if that Operation Northwoods would have been presented to Johnson, who knows?

I mean, he was, I think, a truly evil person. He was a bad, bad person. He may have been like, absolutely, this is the greatest good. We need to invade Cuba. Well, that's what I was going to bring up, right? Is that, you know, just take that as an exercise in ethical theory. You know, some of these people may, they might not have just, you know, enjoyed the thought of destroying innocent people, but they may have been reasoning from what I believe is a severely defunct ethical premise of utilitarianism, right? Well, if we do this, then we might be able to stop nuclear war, right? If we, if we, you know, break a few eggs, we might be able to make this delicious omelet.

And so that too invites, so you can see where like these things invite so, so many and so much more deeper, more probing philosophical questions that that's, that's where I spend most of my time. So when I was kind of like after nine 11 thing, and I started asking these questions, I quickly realized that all the superficial kind of details that the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, there's so much under the water that most people don't think about. They don't analyze. They don't examine that sort of base of assumptions. So the example you're giving is a really interesting one in terms of a certain ethical mode of thinking that some of these people might've been using to think that this behavior

was actually morally justified. When clearly most everybody would say that- Yeah. And you can understand it though, in that, okay, look at those, take a simple example, right? Also, I want to throw out Pearl Harbor as another example. There's a book called Day of Deceit. I recommend it to anybody listening who wants to get a whole new view of Pearl Harbor. And this book was meticulously researched, primary documents, not like someone read 20 other books on Pearl Harbor and wrote the 21st, established journalist and makes, I think, a very compelling case that we absolutely knew that they were coming and we allowed it to happen so we could get into the war.

And anyway, Day of Deceit is the book on that that I recommend. But to get back to your point, okay, so if you look at it, let's boil it down to, is a cure that kills one and saves a thousand an acceptable cure? Yeah, this is one of the classic philosophical thought experiments, right? Even more general one is the old trolley problem, right? You have a trolley kind of careening down the street. You can pull a lever. You can either save your own child or you can, you know, cast three to the fires of death, right? The trolley of death or

whatever you ever. And it's really a question. It's a searching question and an important one. But what if you actually had to make a decision like that? Yeah. So what the question is, what if I had to make a decision? And that's actually a, it's an important, but it's a difficult question because you're asking what I would do. And there's what I would do versus what I should do or what everybody else should do. What Pat Flynn would probably do out of pure emotion and love for my kid is I would probably save my kid, right? But that doesn't mean that that's the right or ethical decision. And it's also important to realize that there can be, and I think that is how you generally look at these things. There can be situations in life where there is no good decision, where those decisions are just bad, no matter which one you pick.

And that there can be certain situations or contexts that given two bad situations, there can still be a right decision to make. I mean, Sophie's choice is another classic one, right? Nazi guard comes in saying, hey, you can either sacrifice one of your kids or all of your, and if you sacrifice one of your kids, we'll spare the rest or we'll kill you all, right? That's another kind of classical ethical quandary or dilemma. So it invites a lot of different questions, but just asking what Pat Flynn would do does not necessarily settle it. You see what I'm saying? Absolutely. Yeah. It makes me think of, I believe it was Oliver Wendell Holmes, the justice. I think he was a chief justice, wasn't he? Oliver Holmes. I'm Googling right now. Yeah. He was an associate justice in the Supreme Court.

I remember one of his positions on right and wrong is that there is no real right or wrong. Right is what the strong say is right, basically. And so you kind of combine that with the greater good kind of, you know, where it can be perverted to say, well, hey, we're in a position to affect our will. And that automatically makes us right. And if you want to put some Calvinistic spin on it, it's that, you know, Hey, we're, we're the chosen, nothing we can do is really going to nothing. And you know, nothing's really going to change that. And all the rest are the doctrine of full on double predestination for any curious theological

listeners. Yeah. So, so the idea is like, Hey, we're the, is it the elect? I forget. The elect and the reprobate. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, good. And us being in the position of power, what we say is right is what's right. There is no objective real right. And we'll do this and we're doing it for the right reasons. And if, yeah, we may have to crack some eggs, but we're going to make a beautiful omelet. Let's pause there because there's so much to unpack. And I think this is a really important point. And the last part you said kind of gives it away, right? We're doing it for the right reasons. So you just said there is no right or wrong, but yet we're doing it for the right reasons. So you've just smuggled the premise right back in, right, that you were trying to ignore. And that's where, you know, it's the trolley car incident, the save one

to, you know, or kill one to save a thousand. They actually tell us something really important. And what they tell us is that all of this is bad, right? And that's the most important insight is that all of this is wrong and it's bad no matter what. So it's speaking to a certain dimension of reality that is so fundamental to our experience, the ethical dimension, the dimension of moral obligations and duties. And the fundamental question that every philosopher has to wrestle with, every human person, I would argue, has to wrestle with, is their binding force, is their objective reality to what we experience in this sort of moral dimension? That's the question, right? So is morality

something, here's the key, that we invent or is morality something that we discover? That is the fundamental difference. And if it's something that we invent, I think you run into a lot of problems. One is that- Right. Is it a construct or is it more of an essentialism type of thing? Well, first off, if it's an invention, right, you've really just collapsed into nihilism immediately, right? Relativism is just a phony holdup for nihilism because you've really reduced everything to preferences and there really is no right or wrong. So you've lost any basis to speak of things like moral progress.

The only thing you can have is moral change, right? So anybody who's a relativist or holds to a sort of useful fiction theory of morality, they have no legs to stand on to condemn things like slavery or persecution or pedophilia or any of that. And nobody, nobody can live consistently with that worldview. Now, just because you can't live consistently with something just because there's an immediate performance contradiction doesn't mean that it isn't true, right? It could be, it could lead to a worldview that seems absolutely absurd, but you know

what? Maybe it still is the case that it's an invention. But what I would argue is that our moral sense isn't provided with a sufficient defeater. Meaning I trust the reliability, the general reliability of my faculties. I trust that there is a world outside of my head that I'm talking to a Mike Matthews right now, that there is a table here. I can see it. I can feel it. There's a microphone. I could taste it. It probably wouldn't taste very good. And then I have this moral sense and it's a different kind of sense. It's not something I see. It's not something I can find under a telescope or a microscope, but it's just as

much a part of my sense experience, right? It's just a part as much of my reality and sometimes even more real. Like I would sooner doubt that I'm talking to Mike Matthews than I would doubt that there's something inherently wrong with raping, beating and killing an innocent child, right? Like that inherent sense of that being wrong is so overpowering to me. Yeah, it's just there's something so visceral about it. I would sooner question my other senses before that, right? So do I have a reason to doubt this sense? And the answer is without any prior metaphysical commitments, no, right?

No, I don't. It seems like if my faculties are kind of a bundle deal, if they're generally reliable, unless I have some really good reason to believe that I'm either in the matrix, hallucinating everything, then I have just as much justification. Or you're a bona fide psychopath and you know it. You're like, yeah, I don't know. I'm broken in that regard. Well, that's the funny thing. When somebody is a psychopath, we say that there's something wrong. We say in the same sense that if somebody's blind, there's something wrong with them. If somebody is lacking that qualitative moral sense of empathy or whatever, we say they are missing something in the same sense that they should have

it. They should have it. Like if somebody is born blind or can't hear or something like that. So even that is telling, right? They're not sensing something that they should be sensing. There's something wrong there. So, you know, it invites a metaphysical investigation. And what i mean by that is what is your ultimate worldview because if you're something like a physicalist right and this is where it all comes from this is where the idea of sort of moral fiction comes from if you're committed to the idea that reality at bottom is just a bunch of dumb physical bits particular bits of matter in motion then it's hard to see how like what like, like, cause morality isn't something that we can find under a microscope or through a telescope. It's nothing that we can turn out through the

empirical sciences. So if you've reduced your worldview to physicalism and believe that the only things that are, that exist are things that can be turned out by the scientific method, you're, you've just automatically ruled morality out of the picture, but it's not something that aside from a prior metaphysical commitment, we have any reason to doubt. I picture. But it's not something that aside from a prior metaphysical commitment, we have any reason to doubt. I would argue that it's a properly basic belief and that any prior metaphysical commitment that would rule it out has itself so many inherent inconsistencies and incoherencies, we shouldn't subscribe to them anyways. So we have just as much reason to trust our moral sense that we really are coming to discover something about the world rather than invent it. Now, some people might bring up evolution, but evolution doesn't

solve the question, right? Because we could have evolved to discover something or invent something. And we generally believe that we evolved to discover the external world, to see real things, to touch. So it just kind of runs the question around in a circle again. So you actually have to go beyond the evolutionary questions if you really want to try and answer this stuff. You got us there, Mike. It's an interesting question, isn't it? Well, and that's not to say that secular people who, I mean, they may even be as far as atheists, couldn't have still that inherent sense of right and wrong and live generally, you know, moral lives and be a net positive in society and understand that you're not supposed to, you're supposed to try to do the best you can within your sphere of influence and

let's say create more positive effects or more construction than negative effects and destruction, right? Yeah. Well, yeah. And that's a really important point. I'm not saying if you are an atheist or a secularist that you can't behave decently. I'm not saying that at all. What I'm saying is in that worldview, you lack the metaphysical or ontological justification for the categories of good, bad, right, or wrong to begin with. And there's a fundamental difference between what I've just said, right? One is a matter of just personal behavior. Of course, you can act in accordance to what I would say is the sort of moral realm, the moral law, which is objective. whether or not you have any, no matter what your prior worldview happens to be. And I think most of us know people who are secular or atheistic,

and I didn't even go into atheism or theism yet, but the question does eventually get there, right? Who are really good people, really good, genuine people. There's no doubt about it. But the question is what worldview can accommodate or explain this moral dimension to reality and what worldview essentially has to eliminate it. That's the more important and the more interesting question. Yeah. Yeah. And, and did I understand you correctly that basically you're saying, let's say you have someone who they don't believe that there's anything spiritual, regardless of ideology, just period that we're're a bunch of atoms and eventually we're just, it's just gonna, we're gonna turn into dust and that's, and that's it. That, that they don't

really have any moral legs to, to stand on in terms of criticizing right and wrong. I just don't know if I understood you correctly. What I'm, what I'm saying is on the, on a sort of physicalist worldview like that, there's no way to account for how morality can be anything other than an invention or a social construct, right? Oh, yes, of course. Yeah. Yeah. And that is all I'm saying. So I'm not saying like, if you're a physicalist or if you're a metaphysical naturalist or anything like that, that you can't be a good person. And sometimes people take that to mean, and that is not what I'm saying. No, no, no. I understand that you weren't saying that. I just- Well, I know you do, but people often

misunderstand the argument. So I'm actually happy that you weren't saying that. I just, well, I know you do, but people, people often misunderstand, misunderstand the argument. So I'm actually happy that you're making these distinctions because they are important. Yeah. And so it'd be more the point of, you know, unless, because the only thing that you could say really is like, well, there's something, it's just biological. It evolved. But to your point, it's like, well, that just doesn't, the, that worldview isn't robust enough when you really start going, okay, well, let's look a little bit

deeper, look a little bit deeper. And that's where a lot of the social constructivism, if that's even a proper word, I think that there's a lot of overlap there with just the very humanistic view of everything. Things are just what we say they are. And there's, there are, there is no real such thing as biological essentialism or even spiritual essentialism. Well, yeah. Like would rape be wrong if we evolved to rate each other? Right. That's, that's a, that's an important question. And this was actually Darwin's fear, him fear himself. You know, he looked at other animals that behaved, you know, if they were held to human standards, quite barbarically. Right. And he thought, know, if they were held to human standards, quite barbarically.

Right. And he thought, well, if humans were raised under the same condition is like, you know, certain insects, like they might destroy a certain number of their young and like bite their heads off and stuff. And like, would that still be wrong? And that's, you know, that's that is the critical question. And biology alone can't answer it. That's that's what I'm saying. It's a deeper, more metaphysical question. Yeah, in that way, it's like, why are we more special than the praying mantis exactly then? Well, that's it, right? It's a question of value.

It's a question of purpose. It's a question of what is this world? Is it reducible to mere fermions and bosons? There's actually a really good atheistic philosopher. So for many years, I was an atheist, right? And then through philosophy, I actually came to theism. And then of all places, I wound up in the Catholic church. So that's the short condensed story, right? But I mean, all the old atheists pretty much affirm this, right? Like Nietzsche, Sartre, Russell, Camus, these guys, but there's Alex

Rosenberg's kind of a more contemporary, and he has a book called The Atheist's Guide to Reality. He just starts from that premise that look, only physical things exist. We're all just kind of different, you know, collections of fundamental particles. And if this is the case, then we have a construction problem. And he gets it because from these sort of like dumb physical particular bits that are unconscious, they're not unified. They can't be about anything. They're unintentional. They're undirected. You can't get consciousness from that. You can't get morality from that. You can't get meaning from that. You can't get truth from that. So he denies that any of these things exist. He's in philosophy, what's called an eliminative materialist. So ironically, he

denies that there's even any meaning in any of the sentences that he wrote in his entire book. But what I would argue is this is a man who's being consistent. He's actually driving through to the conclusions. What I would also argue is he's wrong on his starting point. And at any point that you start at that point and get to such absurdities, such as, I mean, he denies consciousness. So he denies that even you exist, which you can't, you can't really, that is a patently self-defeating in the sense that if consciousness is just an illusion, which some of these eliminated as hold, it just begs the question of who's having the illusion, right?

You just, it's the whole, I think, therefore I am. The one thing I can't deny is myself because to even deny it, I have to exist type of thing. So it's at that point that I would say, no, no, no, no, like he's being consistent. He gets what the consequences would be. He sees that there's a severe construction problem here, that there's things in this world, qualities about this world that a purely physicalist, atheistic, naturalistic

viewpoint cannot possibly in principle explain. So rather than trying to explain them, he denies that they even exist. And what I would suggest, and this is what happened to me when I reached these conclusions is maybe there's more to the world than just physical dumb bits, right? Let's go back and check that starting point. Yep. And then follow that through at the same level of rigor and open-mindedness and see where that takes you. Inference, I mean, so you can do it in a couple ways, right? So now we're arguing, is there some type of transcendent dimension, right? The big question of does God exist? And when I discovered classical thinkers in this sort of theistic tradition, ranging even from the pagans back from Plato to Aristotle up

through Aquinas and then the contemporaries, you can do it through just pure metaphysical or rational demonstration, which a lot of those guys did, deductive forms of argument, or you can just do inference to the best explanation and say like, look, if the foundation to reality, whatever that is, isn't at least mind-like and somewhat personal, then we wouldn't have anything like us. We wouldn't have conscious beings capable of knowledge, reason, logic, mathematics, right? Love, feelings, all these things. It's just, in terms of like best explanation,

it just, it seems so much more obviously powerful in terms of its explanatory scope than the alternative. So there's a number of ways you can get there. And I think they're all valuable and worth exploring, but it's to the point that you said, it's like, just grab, hey, grab two books, weigh the arguments and see what you think. If you want to throw in a, I think a healthy dose of American pragmatism, what tends to work out better for people as well? And I, I don't, I, I couldn't, I couldn't cite research on this. It's not something, I mean, this is something you probably could, uh, but, but not me. Cause I haven't, I haven't really looked in the details

that heavily because I guess I just, it never really occurred to me, but I'm just saying it now that I think that living as if, and I guess it's something that Jordan Peterson has even mentioned, but living- He is. He's a pragmatist. So he holds a pragmatist theory of truth, which I think doesn't work. I'm a correspondence theory of truth guy, but he does make these types of arguments, right? And I'm not even speaking to that specifically because I don't even know enough about that to have an intelligent conversation. Like what you just said, I don't even know exactly what that is. It's actually pretty simple. And then I'll let you finish your point here. If it's useful, it's true. It's kind of the pragmatist. And that's, notice that that's overly simplifying it.

Obviously it has more detail than that. So I don't want to come off as uncharitable, but then the correspondence theory is what's true is what actually matches to reality, right? To say of what is that it is, is to speak, is to speak truth as Aristotle would put it. Right. And that's the common sense view of truth. And I would say the common sense view is actually correct. Right. Well, I mean, if it's useful, it's true, then lying could be, you know, oh, that's useful in this situation. Or it might be useful for me to think that there's monsters living under the manhole cover, so I don't go out in the street and get run over by the bus. But does that mean that it's true that monsters actually live under the manhole? No, right?

Yeah, absolutely. And that's actually a danger to certain sort of naturalistic theories of evolution, is that evolution aims at, supposedly aims at fitness advantage. It doesn't aim necessarily at truth. And those things are not necessarily the same. We can easily conceive of scenarios where we might have developed useful but false beliefs, which then cast doubt on pretty much all of our beliefs, which should also cast doubt on our belief in the theory of evolution. So there's sort of an epistemological circle of self-defeat in that worldview also, if that's what you reduce

everything to. It's interesting. Yeah. Yeah, no, I could, I could see that, but that actually wasn't exactly what I was even going to get to with the pragmatism point, but that's interesting. And it makes sense to me. All I was going to say is if you look at how effective, take worldview, right? So, and I'm totally with you. I totally agree that in many ways, our current circumstances that we find ourselves in in our lives are a product, first and foremost, of our worldviews because those fundamental assumptions about how the world works or how it should work drive our decisions, which drive our behaviors, which drive our outcomes, and here we are. And so if you look at it, okay, there are clusters of worldviews that have been given

titles, right? And which of these worldviews tends to create better life outcomes? To me, and I think I'm just kind of a, I always have been, I just have a bias toward just practicality of what works. Not necessarily what everybody says is, not necessarily dogma, but but if dogma works, then that's fine too. But looking at it in terms of, if I start adopting these worldviews and behaving in line with those, what kind of life outcomes do I get versus these other ones over here? And, um, I think, I mean, it's clear to me, at least just based on, I don't, I don't know about as much about this stuff as you

do, but based on my limited education, my limited understanding of things and how things work, I think the worldview that assumes that there is something transcendent to our existence just works a lot better. We just get down to your day-to-day life is going to be better on the whole. If you put it on a bell curve, some people sure are not going to do, they're going to do really well with it. And that's great for them. Some people are not going to do so well with it, but the majority of people are going to do a bit better in life than if they just adopt the full-on humanistic, materialistic, which can easily turn into nihilistic cluster of worldviews. Yeah. I don't think you can escape nihilism. I think it's only if you maintain a very superficial level of secularism, humanism, atheism, right?

But if you push through like people like these philosophers like Rosenberg do, I think you do get to nihilism. And then I would say, yeah, nobody can- I have a friend actually who, that's him. So he studied history and philosophy in school. He went to GW and got a master's in one of them. I think it was in history, but, and he is a self-avowed atheist, neat guy. I don't hold any, any of his views people, uh, whoever, whoever existed. And he, he would say himself that, uh, he he's has, he's fully in the nihilism band now. And he's got his dues paid up to the nihilism club. Right. And that's, and I think that's transcend that to where like, okay, uh, he's accepted basically these nihilistic assumptions, but he's still going to try to live as a decent person and raise his kid well.

And just because you might as well, basically. Just because, yeah, because, you know. Why not? It's like, you know what? This TV show is on. I don't really like it, but I'm too lazy to turn it off. So I'm here and these are some motions I can do. I might as well do them. Yeah. But there would be nothing wrong in that worldview if he did decide to turn it off. I'm here and these are some motions I can do. I might as well do them. Yeah. But there would be nothing wrong in that worldview if he did decide to turn it off,

to just snuff himself out of existence. And there were certainly nihilistic philosophers. I mean, even going back, he wasn't exactly a nihilist, but he was a pessimist. Like Schopenhauer thought suicide was just a perfectly fine idea for people. But to what you said before about what works, I mean, even that's an interesting question because it assumes that there's something you're working towards that's of value. And so, so immediately we're brought back to the more fundamental questions of like, why should we assume that, like, what are we working towards and why should we even assume that that's valuable to begin with, whether that's human happiness or population growth or whatever the goal is. But I know, I know what you mean. Let's speak personally for being like,

I'm just talking about happiness and life, happiness, life satisfaction, you know, basic, basic things. Societal organization, things like that, right? And there you're definitely, you're definitely, I think, onto something. Because I mean, think about it, right? If you're, and I got there,

I got to the deep pit of nihilism. And it's how you can get to nihilism and not be in deep depression. I don't know. Now, I don't think you should not accept something because it makes you depressed. I think you should accept something because it's true. But at the same time, I don't think you should not accept something because it would make you happy. Just because something makes you happy doesn't mean that it's not true. So sometimes people will say that, but like, oh, you just like religion or you're just religion because it makes you a happy person. Well, I, it makes me happy to think that my wife loves me, but I, I also think I have really

good reasons that she does. Right. So it's not, it's, it's not enough to try and, you know, falsify my belief by talking about my motivations. Even if the only reason I was a religious person is because it made me happy. It wouldn't follow that my religion isn't true, right? You have to look at the arguments again, but to your other point, yeah, what works? I mean, just think about it, right? For even a justice system to work, there's kind of some fundamental philosophical assumptions. One, it's that humans have free will. How you can have justice and consequences and punishment on a sort of deterministic

viewpoint just doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense at all. That moral responsibility, moral culpability is a thing. And again, these moral responsibility, moral culpability make no sense on that physicalist worldview. It can't accommodate them. So what I would say to your friend, you know, is like, Hey, you know, that's awesome, man. Like I've been down that path. I get it, but there's actually really good reasons to believe that God exists. And like, you just like lay out the table of options of what it best explains. It best explains why there is something rather than nothing, why this contingent reality attains at all. It best explains the anthropic coincidences or the

exquisite fine tuning of physics for the emergence of intelligent interactive life. It explains our perception of objective moral values and duties. It explains why consciousness is not reducible to mere physical processes alone. It explains veridical data surrounding near-death experiences, which is absolutely fascinating, right? There's absolutely no physicalist explanation. And I'm not talking about the stuff you read in new age woo-woo books. I'm talking about the stuff you read in like the Lancet and peer-reviewed medical journals of people completely brain dead, flat EEG, fixed and dilated pupils reporting these out of body near death experiences of sensorial knowledge of things that are in the room, going on in the room, outside of the room, in waiting rooms.

It's incredible. You cannot explain that by epoxy or hallucination or any of that, right? I'm going to raise you because I actually haven't looked too much into that specifically, but I could see people at least dismissing it initially like, well, yeah, who knows what, because it's an individual saying that this happened. Well, that's what, that's what veridical means. It means it's publicly attested. So that's the key. It's the veridical experiences, right? Not just the personal. What does that, what does that mean exactly? It means so somebody could come out and have this near-death experience and then like explain from a from a from a third person perspective like what's happening in the operating room as we're dead that other people can attest to or how do you how do you spell veridical v-e-r-i-d verit i-c-a-l veridical

yeah so that's the key because a lot of people have a lot of weird experiences. Siding with reality. That's a cool word. Yep. So yeah, certainly people have hallucinations, no doubt. Right. But hallucinations don't produce veridical experiences. And that's the, that's the key. Yep. So have you looked into, I think it's, I think it's Jim Tucker, uh, heads up a team at UVA and all the research he He carried on the work of Ian, ooh, I might mess up his name, Erickson. I'd have to Google this. Again, I came across this stuff many years ago. A lot of research out of UVA, Jim Tucker for sure is the guy now, into reincarnation and very similar. I mean, they have now, I want to say, 3,000 to 4,000 cases that have been meticulous. And these also have been published in Name a Prestigious Journal and the founder of all this work.

Again, it was Ian, I want to say Erickson, but it might be Stevenson, I don't remember exactly, published in the most prestigious medical journals. And out of the 3,000 to 4,000 cases they've documented, I believe about half of them have been solved, meaning it's exactly what you're talking about. It's someone, there's a famous one of a kid who, I won't take too much time going through all of it, but basically, there was a kid who was having a lot of- He was Cleopatra? Is that it? No, he was having recurring nightmares about being stuck in a cockpit of a plane. It was on fire. And he just would always, this is a young kid, five, six years old, drawing pictures

of dogfights and planes on fire. And this was an obsession of his, right? And so his parents initially thought it's just something he would grow out of. And he didn't, he kept going. And so they started asking him about it. Like, what exactly is this, right? And so as they're probing him, he tells that he in his last lifetime he fought in world war ii um and he told them eventually they got a name out of him this is a young kid he might be seven

or eight now but he's still a young kid and he said he got shot down in japan over some bay his plane was uh he was on fire he was stuck and he drowned and you know they were like oh okay buddy sure and then they actually looked into it and they're like what the dude existed the name they found him the squadron he was in he and uh yes this this guy did get shot down over some bay in japan exactly as the kid told them and so then they were like oh what the fuck and because it you know what I mean? What do you do at that point? Right. So, so, so, so even fast forward. So they, so they found someone, there was, I believe one remaining dude from his little squadron that was still alive.

And they just arranged a call. These are details that are just coming back to me. There were more details. These are the ones that stood out, the vivid ones that stood out in my mind. And so they arranged a Skype call with this guy, didn't tell their son who this guy is. Their son immediately recognized him, calls him by name, no, Charlie, starts crying, how are you doing? It's been so long. Starts asking about his wife by name, how are your kids? And the guy, Charlie, doesn't even know what to think. I believe that was his name, right? He was just like, whoa, what is going on? And how it ends though is, and I remember hearing about this because there was a company that was, they were going to make a movie about it. How it ends is the kid goes, he gets flown by the production company out to Japan, to the Bay where they're

the plane. They, they find the plane it's on the, at the bottom of the Bay. And he holds a funeral for himself in his previous life. And that gives him closure after that, that was the end of the nightmares, the end of the, of the obsession with the dog fights.. That was the end of the nightmares, the end of the obsession with the dog fights. And that was the end of the whole thing. So that's just one of over 1,500, 1,600 cases that have been solved like that. Like all the details have been verified that are able to be verified. And it got to a point where it's just like, cool, this definitely happened. And this nine-year-old kid, it's usually children. Most of the cases of this happens with children. This kid definitely knew

about it. We have no idea how. Yeah. And it's just another weight in the scale. You know what I mean? It's like, okay, if we're committed to physicalism, here's another thing that is going to be really, really difficult to explain, if not in principle impossible don't we don't even have to make that strong of a claim we can just say it's better explained by this type of worldview right and now i think now i think you get in a weird like oh from from okay so we have these ancestral memories in our dna and then in quantum you know we have quantum entanglement between and so this this kid wasn't actually this guy. It's just that their DNA. Sure. Yep.

And that's why you got to compare. That's why I like near-death experiences, right? There's just no physical explanation at all for these things. And that's why I think there's a lot stronger weight in the scale than, say, hallucinogenic. Sometimes people want to bring up, but the brain's still active. There could be many plausible physicalist explanations there, but not for these veridical near-death experiences. And that's just in addition to all that other list of things that I put out before that. Like, I think, you know, through logic alone, we can know God exists. Just when you understand conditioned reality, and then you just realize there's things in this world, right, that exist, but they don't have to exist.

Like, reality didn't need to include me, Mike. It didn't need to include you. I'm really glad it did. Like, I'm really glad that reality included you and we're happy. Right. It's, it's awesome, but we're conditioned meaning like we exist because there's certain conditions being fulfilled that allow us to exist. And, and not just in a temporal sense, like my parents meeting or something like that, but in a hierarchical sense, like down through the chain of being, as it were, like I depend on the conditions of my organs, molecular structure, chemical bonding, electromagnetic fields. And then we can just ask a simple question, like could all of reality, the totality of reality, whatever that is, be a conditioned reality collectively? And the answer is no, it can't. Because then that would

mean that all of reality is awaiting on the fulfillment of conditions outside of itself in order to exist, which would just mean that there would be nothing. There would be absolutely nothing if this is what all of reality were like. And this was Leibniz famous question, right? Like, why is there something rather than nothing? And Thomas Aquinas speculated the same thing. Like, why does anything attain in reality at all? And what they realized is all reality is amazingly in some way, self-sufficient. There can't be anything outside of reality to cause all of reality. That's an absurdity. There's, there's not, if it was outside of all reality, then it would be non-reality. It just doesn't make sense, right? So there has to be some layer, some foundation, some bottom floor to reality that exists in

a radically different way. And it has a necessary nature. It exists because reality had to include it or because of it, the rest of reality is able to exist. And these are the type of sort of logical deductions that are extremely tight that you can show like, look, it's unable to explain why anything exists at all. People, fermions, bosons, electrons, protons, anything that could change or could be otherwise, there has to be some necessarily existing ground of reality. And then we can probe and ask like questions about that, where I would say like, look,

if it isn't mind-like and personal, then there's no way we could get consciousness or this or that. It can't just be fermions and bosons, right? Those are serious arguments. They're arguments that once I encountered them when I was, you know, kind of working through this stuff, they convinced me. Or maybe even an agnostic type of spirituality, something that would postulate maybe that we are spiritual in nature. We're not our bodies. We have bodies. We have even minds. Maybe that's even separate, right? And we use our minds. Why Christianity? Well, two things. Because you could still have a supreme being. Of course. Of course. Yeah. So I was a theist before I was a Christian and I was a Thomist before I was a Catholic.

Right. So you bring up a good point. And the short answer is because, well, because Jesus, and I think that we can talk about that, but also the Catholic church always interested me because it had such a robust, consistent and coherent worldview from start to finish, right. Of what reality is. And you say, you know, the way that the Catholic church views the soul is as the form of the body in a sort of Aristotelian sense. So it's not this weird Cartesian dualism, which I think is actually pretty incoherent when you get to it. And it's a problem of a lot of the sort of mind-body problems and philosophy of mind and stuff like

that. The Catholic Church is able to avoid all of that in their background metaphysics and stuff like that. So I was always intrigued as I kind of kept going deeper into philosophy of ethics, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, to just see that all of my conclusions somehow kept lining up with the things that the Catholic church teaches and believe. So that just made me interested, first off. But the Catholic church isn't a school of philosophy either, right? It's a religion. And it makes some very strong claims. It claims that God not only exists, but he incarnated, he came to earth, that we're sinful. There's something wrong with us.

That seems obvious that there's something wrong with us. Right. And that he somehow like got nailed to it. Come on. That he somehow got nailed to a piece of wood in atonement for our sins, you know, whatever that means. And then here's the critical claim and sort of divine endorsement of that, right. To say like, this is actually true.

There was a super miracle, which is of course the Christian resurrection. And that always intrigued me because it seemed like it was the one religion that really made itself vulnerable to falsification, especially through the historical method. It's like, okay, maybe we can kind of look through history and see that this is all made up or legendary or myths. But what absolutely surprised me, Mike, is as I started to take the historical method seriously, and I learned so much about the historical process when I was looking through this, the data that the vast majority of historians agree on about the person of Christ is really,

really solid. They agree on data points of not only his existence, but the empty tomb, the experiences of post-mortem appearances, the origin of Christian belief, all these things. And then we're back to the, to the same thing we were talking about before is like, what can best explain that? Hallucination can't do it. Conspiracy theories can't do it. Right. But it actually seems like a miracle. The one thing that everybody talked about did happen actually explains this really well. And then we can use probabilistic reasoning and saying, okay, if I have good reasons for thinking God exists and that God is all good and all loving, and I think- Well, that wouldn't be God per se, that'd be Jesus, that Jesus existed. Well, hold on. Yeah. I'm not saying that yet. I'm saying if I have

good independent reasons to think that God is all good, all loving, supreme, and I think all that can be demonstrated philosophically. So we can go back to that if you want. But if I have independent reasons to think that's the case, then what is the probability that something like what we have historically with Jesus would occur? It actually seems like the probability might be pretty high. The God that created us for a reason and purpose because he loves us might actually want to do something like this.

That seems consistent. So not only do we have a strong historical basis that we can try to make inferences from that are certainly reasonable. I don't think you can. Why create, and please don't take this. I'm not trying to challenge you in a. Please challenge. That's what philosophers say. In a hostile way. I mean, I know you wouldn't, I'm figuring you wouldn't take it like that, That's what philosophers say. create us and make us go through all this suffering. And it was God just bored. Well, so that's, that's the key, right? And that is the strongest argument against theism. Like if an all good, all loving God exists, then why is there evil and suffering? Right. And that's, that's the thing I used to trot out more than anything when I was an atheist. And the problem with that is, I actually understand. I mean, I could come up with an argument against that

fairly easy. I mean, like why bother with any of this? Why, if, if, if he knows everything, if we're all, if he has a plan, everything's predestined, why bother with any of it? Who cares about what's right and wrong, suffering, bad things happening. You know, you could just say, oh, that's part of a bigger plan and we don't know what that plan is. And so what looks like, you know, what comes next? I understand that. That's another, that's different, but why bother with any of it? Well, let's take it. Let's take it one step at a time. Cause I think it is important to address the problem with evil. Cause there might be somebody listening right now who, who that actually hits, who actually hits pretty hard. I'll probably learn something too, but I'm just

saying that, that, like that, even to me, someone would say that I'd be like, eh, I think I could probably come up with a good, uh, yeah, yeah. But it is, it is important. And then I, then I will get to your point. Cause that, that is equally important. So, um, the problem with the problem of evil or suffering is not, it is not actually all that intellectually difficult because it rests on two broken premises, right? Like if God is all powerful, he can create any world he wants. If God is all good, then he would create a world that's free of suffering and evil. And there's no reason to think that either of those premises are true.

So first off, to say that God is all powerful doesn't mean that he can create nonsense, right? He can create any logically possible world, but a world of free creatures that are forced to act a certain way is just an inherent contradiction. It's a meaningless statement. So, so if God had reason to create free creatures, which I think is actually going to go into, into your point, Mike, right? Then built into that is the, is just the inherent consequences that they might choose to do some really wrong things, right? And for souls to interact meaningfully, right? To have moral development, to learn from consequences, to progress in the sort of quality of our souls. We also need a fixed and rigid playing board, right? If things just

work by miracles all the time, that we'd never be able to interact, nothing could be learned or could be happening. So there we have the sort of basis for why the world is orderly, intelligible, et cetera. But even furthermore, it just assumes that God couldn't have morally sufficient reasons for allowing evil and suffering to exist. And I think that's plainly false. I think most of us can look at our life, and if there's just one counterexample, then this argument is clearly not necessarily true. If there's one example in your life where you've gone through suffering or suffered from something, but some greater good came out of it, then that's it. Then the whole, the problem, you know, the problem of

evil collapses because both of the premises are not necessarily true. So, so intellectually, it's actually, it doesn't have that much force and most philosophers don't really argue about it. Is that not at odds though, with some of the stuff we're talking about earlier, like, like I take a baby getting raped to death. Um, is there really much good in that? Don't we have like just a visceral, we go, no, that's wrong. Like, it's just not right to rape babies to death. And then if, if you do go rape a baby to death, could you then use that as a justification that, Hey, well, this is God's world.

I'm just playing in it. And this is happening. I mean, I really like your, your beliefs allow for free will, but they're also, and again, I'm just kind of ignorant, but aren't there mainstream for lack of a better word, sects or strains of Christianity that, that reject that and say that everything is predestined and predetermined. Yep. Yeah. And so that's part of the reason I'm Catholic, right? So you talked about Calvin full on double predestination. It's a mouthful, right? That's what they hold. I think that you cannot reconcile that with an all loving and all just God. I don't think that an all loving,

all just God from all eternity would just choose certain people to save and through no fault of their own, just damn a bunch more. And I think that is a defeater of Calvinism. It's inconsistent with what we can know coherently about God. Catholics don't believe that, right? So yeah, I mean, that's just, I think you can actually use philosophy to kind of cut down not just Christianity, but religions that can't be true, right? Just because what we can know about God philosophically doesn't correspond with the theology of that religion. And that's kind of what I did. I kind of used philosophy as sort of a parsing method. And then it just kept lining up with the Catholic church and so not lining up with any other religion. As to your point about why would God bother, to me, I think it's actually pretty

simple. Sorry, just quickly, I'm actually curious. What about the baby raping point? I mean, then you'd say a baby that got raped to death, there's some sort of greater good in that? Well, I think that ultimately there's going to be reconciliation, right? On the theistic worldview, we can at least hope that despite that horrific tragedy that it is, that there's some eternal salvation for that baby. There's some eternal justice. So yeah, it's theism. Theism is the only worldview that can actually give us any hope of any good coming out of an otherwise horrific situation. Physicalism

doesn't answer that. That baby's dead. It's gone. The parents suffer until they die. And that's the end. There's no justice. There's no reconciliation. Right. So, so then it would be the, the, the good that would come of it would be more of a spiritual sense. You're saying, okay, so the baby's soul could go to heaven and therefore there was a greater good to that happening. Yeah. Or reincarnate if you believe in that or whatever, right? But there's at least the possibility, right? And we don't have to know how it works out. Was it necessary for a baby to get raped to death though for that to happen?

Like couldn't it not get raped to death and have that happen too? Maybe not, right? Like God, you know, so the way that we think of God is he has eternal knowledge. Catholics don't think of God as having foreknowledge, right? So God could kind of, in a simultaneous moment, understand all logically possible realities, all ends to all realities, is outside of time. So, you know, is it necessary? That's an interesting question. And I don't, but I don't think we have to answer it. I think we can just say that the fact that it did happen means that, and this is the important thing for the problem of evil, right? If it doesn't go through, it doesn't go through. And then we can just say that the fact that it did happen means that, and this is the important thing for the problem of evil, right?

If it doesn't go through, it doesn't go through. And then we can, we can kind of wrestle with these questions, but just because we're wrestling with them, like they're no longer an argument against theism. You see what I'm saying? They're just difficult for us emotionally at this point. And that is where evil has really forced. Cause it is, I'm with you, man. Like you hear these horrible things happening and like, it makes you, it makes you angry and it almost makes you angry at God, especially if you are a theist. And there's

so much of that. And the funny thing is there's so much of that in the Bible. I mean, most of the, the Psalms in the Bible are just complaints against God, right? They're just like, what, what is going on in the old Testament? God is, uh, he's pissed. He does a lot of, there's a lot of genociding. There's a lot of bad stuff in there. The Psalms are in the Old Testament, right? Okay, and that shows my ignorance. Yeah, so much of it is, and then, you know, you have biblical interpretations of like,

is that literal history or is this allegorical? And that's really important too, is Catholics don't look at the Bible as, the Bible is a collection of books that, by the way, the Catholic Church put together, right? People sometimes don't look at the Bible as, the Bible is a collection of books that, by the way, the Catholic church put together, right? People sometimes don't realize how the Bible came together. It was the Catholic church that closed the canon and assembled the Bible. So even if you're a Protestant, you think you rely on no tradition, but just the Bible, you're still relying on the tradition of the Catholic church that they decided these books should be in and shouldn't, right? But the Catholic church, for example, and I want to get

back to your other point, all of these are really interesting topics and important. It doesn't interpret like Genesis as a map of etiology of how the universe scientifically unfolded, right? And it never has. St. Augustine, you know, in the fourth century said that, look, God could have released certain potentialities in the universe that could have unfurled in any manner over any expanse of time. What Genesis is teaching us are deep, important spiritual and theological truths. And that again, also really appealed to me about the Catholic church is it didn't, it never took, and this is like some 1500 years before Darwin, mind you, right? So it's not like the church is retreating in the face of modern science. It's just always held this tradition of saying, look, the Bible

is a collection of books. Some of these books are allegorical. Some of them are literal history. Some of them are pastoral letters. Some of them are biographies. Some of them are poems. So if you ask, people will ask me, like, you're a Catholic, do you take the, you know, the Bible literally? I'll say, do you take the, you know, do you take the library literally? It depends what section you're in. Depends what book you're reading, right? Yeah, that's a good answer to that. Yep. So yeah, so that's important. But yeah, the whole Psalms thing, the interesting about the Psalms are just all the laments and the complaints. And I think that part of this, that's a very natural thing. So it's important to kind of settle it intellectually by saying, okay, this isn't an intellectual, like I shouldn't not believe in God because of evil. And in fact, evil points to

God because it just brings us back to the moral argument, right? Evil is a lack of good. And the fact that we even experience any lack of good and somehow perceive this standard of supreme goodness of ultimate justice, mercy, compassion, like where did we ever get these ideas from? Right? So in an indirect way, I would say evil, actually, if you even want to get the problem of evil off the ground, you already have to affirm God's existence. Otherwise, it makes no sense because there is no evil. There is no good. I mean, would you say, though, you have to affirm the existence of something beyond the material?

It doesn't have to be the Christian God. I mean, it could be a supreme being of a different type, right? Well, I think if you're going to be. I understand how you've come to that. But to start, it's like, okay, there's something else. Let's say you're somebody and you're like, yes, I see what you're saying. I do think there is, I think there's a strong argument to me that there's something else. Is it Jesus? I don't know, but you know, that this is the first step is I'm going to say that, yeah, I'm open to the idea that, you know, maybe there is a bit more than just than just a bunch of

articles. So you're absolutely right. Yeah. And that's what happened to me, right? Like I said, I became a theist before I became a Christian and a Thomist, right? In line with Thomas Aquinas before I became a Catholic. And this is actually what C.S. Lewis does in Mere Christianity. Really, really great book is he actually gets people to theism first through the moral argument. The first couple of chapters are just a classic development of these types of moral arguments that we've been kind of highlighting, but not developing too deeply in this conversation. And then only once he gets people to theism, which you can get to, you can just kind of get to, you know, belief in a transcendent God that has this certain nature, right? But then you might not think that there's basis or ground for

becoming a Christian or something like that. You could do that. I would say that you're stopping a little prematurely, and there actually is good basis to make that move. But yeah, in principle, you certainly could. And that is a step. That'd be probably a better place to be. Again, if we come right back down to how it's going to impact the quality of your life, the reason why I'm bringing it back to that is that matters. It just matters. Even though it seems so insignificant when you're looking at the, the mysteries of the universe. Uh, if for nothing else, you're like, you know what, I'm going to, even if it's like, okay, let's say take the afterlife, right there. Maybe there is something

after, and maybe it's, maybe it's heaven and hell, or maybe it's reincarnation. Let's say those are the two options that we're considering. Or maybe it's mixed. You could keep it open, right? Sure, sure. But let's just say that we're not even going to think with maybe it's Valhalla or whatever, right? Yeah, yeah. There could be any number of possibilities after you die.

You don't have to be settled on that right now. Right, right. But okay, so if that's the case, I'm going to accept that as true. And that just means as true as I can't now unconvince myself or I can't make a strong enough argument to say that's definitely not the case. And I can make a strong argument for it being the case. And so I'm going to accept it as true. That is then inevitably going to have positive impacts in your life because maybe it'll

occur to you then that certain things are not a great idea. If that means you, maybe you're going to be judged by your creator after this is all done, or you're just going to come back to the world that you are leaving behind. And then it can give you some hope, too, that when you're going through hard times, whether it's there might be you might have an eternity in heaven waiting for you, and that's going to be very nice. Or you might have a lot many more lifetimes ahead of you. And the fact that right now this one is not going so well. Okay. In the scheme of things, you know, actually that that's okay because maybe this is this infinite game that we're playing and the game is not going so great right now, but that's the nature of any game, right? If a game was always going well, it'd be boring, right? We need some chaos to make it fun.

Yeah. Yeah. And you know, the thing of heaven, and of course, it's been so caricatured over the years that the way that Catholics think of heaven and especially hell is often way different than what most people are familiar with. And we also have to remember, we grew up in a heavily Protestant culture. Catholicism was not generally favored in the founding of America, right? They were restricted to two states. They were often hung, persecuted, things like that. So our country was founded by Protestants. So what most people, the picture of Christianity that most people get in America is very Protestant-y, right? It's not very Catholic. But the Catholic conceptions of heaven make perfect sense, right?

If we have a maximally good God who wants to will the maximum amount of good that he can, then it seems like anything less than heaven's actually incompatible with that. So, so the argument that heaven sounds too good to be true is actually an argument for what exactly we should expect if we have an all good. Right. Supreme being. Right. And then like anything less than that doesn't, doesn't quite make sense.

And then the Catholic conception of hell, just real quick, because again, it's, it's just, I know what the tur is a lot of people, but hell in Catholic theology isn't a place where God sends people, right? Hell is a state that people enter into by willfully rejecting God, right? So hell is a place that God allows people to go. And he makes this, you know, very clear that that isn't what he wants, but he, he respects his creature's freedom. It comes back to that, to that fundamental thing. Right. And it seems to me like, why would God bother to your other point is that God would want to make a maximally good world. And it seems like a world where there are moral agents, moral creatures that can learn to do really good things like love. Like that seems like the highest, right? But learn to love other people. But there's other

really good things, other really good experiences too, and can develop morally in communion and relationship to other people. That just seems like such a better, and do so freely, right? Freely, they're not puppets. That just seems like such a much better world than one with puppets or no opportunity for that at all. So that's, do I know the mind of God yet? If you're God and you're going to do it, do it in a way that's most interesting or- Most good.

Maximal goodness, as I would say. And that just seems so much better. Wouldn't maximal goodness literally be only good? Why even have evil if you really want- And I don't mean to really- Because that's what we just went over, right? No, no. No, because think about it, right?

Is it necessary? Yeah. In order to have justice, you have to have injustice and justice is a really good thing. In order to have compassion, you have to have issues where you can be compassionate about. So it's, and all this comes from free will, like in order to have genuine free will and consequences, it seems like the ability to, especially to choose love, right? If that's kind of the target. And I think that's a reasonable target. And let me just say, once you get,

it's kind of dangerous to say like, if I was God, I would do it this way because that leads to a lot of bad ideas, right? Like if I was God, I wouldn't design like centipedes, but that's not an actual argument against God, right? But it seems like- Centipedes are kind of cool, actually. I would have left them out, personally.

I know, some people like them, but I would have left them out. Yeah, they're definitely from some other planet but so so so we're in kind of theology now right and i'm not an expert in this but it seems consistent with what i can know philosophically about god that that evil would exist and that some greater goods that might not be possible without free will or and or only possibly because of free will actually help to explain why bad things happen explain why bad things happen and why bad things happen to, to otherwise good people and why good things even happen to bad people at times. Right. So it's not, it's not something that we can know because we don't know

absolutely the mind of God. Right. But it's something we can see there's certainly a consistency and coherency to that picture. Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, again, I want to dwell on that. I just have a hard time reconciling to my mind. And again, it might just be that I'm not very educated. I don't consider myself even remotely an expert. I'm barely a dilettante here, but that you can have free will and a lot of good, or you can have no free will and maximum good, but that just might be me being unsophisticated. Well, yeah. So if you don't have, well, you don't have maximum good because it seems like free will is a good thing, right? So you're automatically minus one there. Okay. Right. I mean, I feel like that might though, just be our, if you're a construct. Don't you think it's better that you chose to love your

wife and that she chose to love you rather than you're just pre-programmed? What if I don't even, what if I don't know that? What if I'm pre-programmed and I'm not aware of it and I just experience it? Well, just as simple as you are, right? Because free will is one of those properly, like it just really seems like I'm choosing to raise my arm right now, which I am, right? Unless I have some really good reason to doubt it, which again is a prior metaphysical commitment. It just seems obvious. Oh no, I agree there. I agree there. And it does seem obvious that it would be better for me to be able to choose to love than to be pre-programmed. That seems perfectly. I guess if you start with that saying, okay, that's, we're going to hold that as the highest good. And then from there, we're going to have to accept some things that would appear not to be good, but they're in service of the higher good. Then I could see that from a, just a logical standpoint. Yeah, and there's logical design constraints

is kind of what we're saying. It's like there's logically incompatible realities here. It's an A or not A. Like if we have free will and that is a better thing to have than not, then there's certain design restraints that were possibilities that could fall out of that. And evil was absolutely one of them.

Now, I don't want to just wave this away because I struggled with this a long time, right? Everybody suffers. Everybody knows absolute tragedies where you look and you see like, oh my God, how could, how can that make any sense? Especially if it happens to you, right? That's going to, that's going to cut the- Or your kids. Let's make it worse. Your kids, right? So what I would say is go back to the intellectual side of it. Realize, okay, we have good reasons to kind of support our belief here in something higher up and further out, right? And that we can hold on to hope. And this is why in Catholic theology, hope is a virtue,

right? It's the fighter's virtue. You keep punching because you won't need hope in heaven because you'll see things fully, right? But we do need hope here and now. So it's hope and faith. Faith and again, Catholic theology isn't just like some thing, well, I just believe it. No, faith is an act of trust to Catholics. Like I have good reason to believe this and I'm going to continue to trust it even in the face of adversity, even as I suffer, even as my family suffers, right? Because I have good reason to believe it. I'm going to try and make the best of the situation. So that's where you kind of have to, you kind of have to actually exit philosophy because you can, you can kind of drive yourself in really painful

circles and then start to live the spiritual life and start to do things like all these weird things as Catholics do, you know, pray and all that. Not eat meat on Friday, right? Yeah. Sometimes, yeah. Sometimes we do that. Yep. Yep. And, you know, that's the whole point of those prudential considerations are just their help to build virtue. Virtues like temperance, fortitude, and virtues are kind of like soul building qualities, right? So people think they're arbitrary, but there's actually reasons that Catholics, historical reasons why these things are there. And a lot of it comes down to trying to live the spiritual life because Catholics don't believe in once saved, always saved or predestination, right? We believe that this life actually matters and that there's certain ways that we can dispose our soul toward God and there's certain ways that we can turn our soul away from God. And that's what it ultimately comes down to. And that's where I have to kind of punt to a theologian or priest to do more work than that, because that is not my area of expertise. Yeah. No, hey, this was a very interesting conversation. Actually, so for people who are still listening, let me know. I mean, I'll see on the analytics, but let me know if, I mean, Pat, if you'd be up for this. I mean, I just like talking to you. We could probably talk about a lot

of different things because you just know a lot about a lot of different things. And I know some about, I know a bit about some things and this would be fun to do as like, I don't know, once a month where it's has nothing to do with fitness. And it doesn't, it doesn't have to be about, you know, we kind of went all over the place here, but we could, we could just have wide ranging, whatever, wherever it goes, we could start with maybe a loose topic or two. Like actually kettlebells. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We could do kettlebells too. We could do kettlebells, but anyway, let people, if people are people listening, reach out, let, let me know if, if you'd like that, would you be up for that, Pat?

Oh, I'd love to, man. This has been a blast. This is a, you're an excellent conversationalist and you present really good questions and honestly challenges too. I mean, that's what it's all about. Like if you can't overcome these challenges, then that's an issue. Like you have to be able to think these were things I had to think through, like everything you you've talked about on this mic were things that I had to think through as I was kind of, you know, searching around, searching these, these foundations. So it's not like I was just, you know, born and brought up in this. Now, if that, if that were the case, it still wouldn't mean that it's not like I was just, you know, born and brought up in this. Now, if that were the case, it still wouldn't mean that it's false, right? That's another.

Sure. Of course. But, but I had to, you know, really, I kind of started on the opposite end of the spectrum, like your, your friend, you know, who kind of was influenced. Which makes it more interesting, actually. I was deeply influenced by, it was actually a writer who really got me into the atheist at first, just, and I don't want to bore people any longer, but, um, it was HL Mencken. Have you ever heard of him? Of course. The, uh, what's that, what's that famous quote? Uh, basically like every so often a man just has to spit on his hand. What is it? Raise the black flag and start cutting off heads

or something, right? Yeah. He's got so many great quotes. He's such an amazing pro stylist, but he was a bitter old atheist, right? And him and my early interest in writing that I just got so steeped in the old atheists. They colored my worldview for so long until it ultimately just collapsed and then everything we just discussed. Mencken's hilarious. He's absolutely hilarious. Here it is. Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. How great is that? There's something primal. There's something as a man that just resonates to your very fiber. You know what I mean? Yeah, and he's such a polemicist. I mean, he stirred so much controversy in his day, but he's so witty. I mean, and his prose style is so unique and so interesting. Obviously, I have deep philosophical disagreements with him at this point, but as a writer, I mean, if you're into writing, I mean, get a Mencken Christomathy because it's just so

– and that Christomathy means just like – he uses big fancy words like that. It's just a collection of his choicest writings. But then I would also, my other favorite writer who really kind of turned a lot of it for me, who I was reading a little bit later was C.S. Lewis. So I would also recommend, because Lewis was a great philosopher. He wasn't just a great writer, which I think Mencken was missing. He was smart.

He was, but he didn't think on as deep a level as Lewis. So when you get to like Lewis's books, like not just mere Christianity, but his book, his book miracles is just awesome. And it's not like miracle stories, right? He's giving a philosophical analysis of naturalism of supernaturalism at the beginning. And he was engaging with some of the smartest thinkers of his time. So it's a really cool read to, to kind of work your way through. So if, if listeners are interested in kind of work your way through. So if listeners are interested

in kind of diving, if you're looking for like an accessible, but yet still pretty rigorous presentation of some of the things we've talked about, I would recommend those two books from Lewis. Awesome. And you'd also recommend that people go to where to learn more about you and your work. Well, if you enjoy these types of conversations, The Pat Flynn Show. Also, read your book, of course. Yeah, oh yeah. So The Pat Flynn Show on iTunes.

Every Sunday, I have a segment called Sunday School. That's where I bring on a lot of philosophers, people who are way smarter than I am. And people that kind of tackle these big questions. Oh, stop. You're being so mom. No, it's actually true. People actually ask me where I find a lot of these people because a lot of them people because they're like,

they're a lot of them, a number of them are an academia, so they're not well known. But they're really interesting. I think anyways, it's a selfish podcast because I just like talking about this stuff like I think we both do. And then I talk with Dan John once a week and I do talk about fitness as well. So the Pat Flynn Show on iTunes, my book, How to Be Better at Almost Everything, which we talked in our last conversation, is on Amazon, and that's about- Which I'm going to just make a note that you came before, it's called Range, by the guy who wrote The Sports Gene, I think. You know what I'm talking about?

I know who you're talking about, yes, and thank you. Nobody's accused me of plagiarism yet, but I did come before that guy. And so David Epstein. Yeah, Epstein. And I actually, honestly, I did come before that guy. Yep. Yep. And so David Epstein. Yep. Yeah. Epstein. And I actually, I honestly, I haven't read that book. I've heard good things, but I haven't had a chance to pick it up yet, but my book is on generalism that it's good to be good at a lot of different things and stack skills. And that can give you competitive advantages and refer people to our previous conversation. And my website is chronicles of strength.com. So you can hop over there and get on my email list and all that if you so desire.

Well, this was great, Pat. And, uh, we're going to do it again. We're going to, I'm sure, I'm sure I'm going to, I'm going to hear from quite a few people who are going to, who are going to say, yes, please do it. Because whenever, whenever I put something up that is a bit of field, right. Is not just me monologuing about something related to fitness or interviewing somebody related to fitness. It always gives good feedback. So I look forward to the next one.

We can, we can line it up. A monthly segment, man. I'd love it. That'd be a ton of fun. If people can tolerate it. So you listen to your audience. We're going to do it. And then people are gonna have to force us to stop. That's how it'll work. Awesome, man. here. And if you like what I'm doing on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider picking up one of my bestselling health and fitness books, including Bigger, Leaner, Stronger for Men, Thinner, Leaner, Stronger for Women, my flexible dieting cookbook, The Shredded Chef, and my 100% practical and hands-on blueprint for personal transformation inside and outside of the gym, The Little Black Book of Workout Motivation. Now, these books have

sold well over 1 million copies and have helped thousands of people build their best bodies ever. And you can find them on all major online retailers like Audible, Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and Google Play, as well as in select Barnes & Noble stores. Again, that's Bigger Leaner Stronger for Men, Thinner Leaner Stronger for Women, The Shredded Chef, and The Little Black Book of Workout Motivation. Oh, and I should also mention that you can get any of the audiobooks 100% free when you

sign up for an Audible account, which is the perfect way to make those pockets of downtime like commuting, meal prepping, and cleaning more interesting, entertaining, and productive. So if you want to take Audible up on that offer, and if you want to get one of my audio books for free, go to www.legionathletics.com slash Audible. That's L-E-G-I-O-N athletics slash A-U-D-I-B-L-E and sign up for your account.