The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Peterson Admits He Got This Wrong

Episode Date: October 11, 2026

What does a man who spent seventy five years living in his father’s tent have to do with the question you have been avoiding about your own life? In this lecture, Jordan Peterson works through the story of Abraham and arrives at the hardest passage in scripture, the moment a father is told to take his only son up a mountain and offer him as a burnt offering. The atheists call it proof of a monstrous God. Peterson thinks they have the story upside down, and getting to why takes him through a savings account, a sports team, a statue Michelangelo carved at twenty four, and the thing every mother does on the first day of school. Then a police officer asks him for one piece of advice, and the answer takes six minutes and costs Moses the promised land. By the end there is a calculation involving twenty minutes, fifty repetitions, and the two percent of your life you could fix this week. What Abraham is actually offered turns out not to be faith in the conventional sense at all, but a trade: everything you are comfortable with, in exchange for something you already know you want more. This lecture was filmed on March 10, 2024, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Unlock the ad-free experience of The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast and dive into exclusive bonus content on DailyWire+. Start watching now: http://dwpluspeterson.com/yt ALL LINKS: https://feedlink.io/jordanbpeterson // LINKS // Peterson Academy https://petersonacademy.com Books - https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/books/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Everybody has that list. The things you know you should get around to eventually, organizing the garage, updating important documents, taking care of long-term financial planning. Life insurance tends to live on that list for a lot of people, not because it isn't important, because people assume it's going to be complicated. That's why PolicyGenius exists. PolicyGenius is an online insurance marketplace that helps you compare life insurance quotes from top insurers in one place. for free. Their license team helps explain your options clearly, compare coverage amounts and prices, answer questions, and help you find a policy that fits your needs. No guesswork, no confusion, just clarity. And while they're helping with the shopping, you can get back to enjoying summer

with the people who matter most. PolicyGenius has helped thousands of families find the right coverage and has earned thousands of five-star reviews in the process, because some items on the to-do list are checking off. With PolicyGenius, you can see if you can find 20-year life insurance policies starting at just $276 a year for $1 million in coverage. Head to PolicyGenius.com to compare life insurance quotes from top companies and see how much you could save. That's policygenius.com. Are you noticing your car insurance rate creep up even without tickets or claims? You're not alone. That's why there's Jerry, your proactive insurance assistant. Jerry handles the legwork by comparing

quote side by side from over 50 top insures so you can confidently hit buy. No spam calls, no hidden fees. Jerry even tracks rates and alerts you when it's best to shop. Drivers who save with Jerry can save over $1,300 a year. Don't settle for higher rates. Download the Jerry app or visit jerry.a.ai slash wire today. This episode is brought to you by Alloy Health.

A widening part, a ponytail that suddenly feels smaller, more hair in your brush, and somehow an entire wig in the shower drain. Hair changes can feel deeply personal. Almost 40% of women experience hair loss during menopause, and hormones may be driving it. Alloy offers prescription solutions for the scalp, lashes, and brows,

all through menopause-specialized doctors. Its oral treatments can address female hair loss, while its lash and brow serum is clinically proven to produce fuller, longer lashes, and thicker, darker brows, in as little as eight weeks. Everything starts online. and your prescription is delivered directly to your door.

With Alloy, your best hair isn't behind you. Visit MyAloid.com and use the code DailyWire to get 20% off your first order. Your menopause specialized doctor will tailor your care to your needs. Plus, you get $0 unlimited messaging with your doctor. Head to M-Y-A-L-L-O-Y.com and use code DailyWire to get 20% off your first order. This code is valid on products only. So I'm going to leap right into the story tonight, and I'll backfill and expand as we go along. On this tour, I've been walking through a selection of the biblical stories.

That's what I do in this book, We Who Wessel with God. And as I tell this story, I'll explain what I think it means. I think I'll explain what I know it means. I don't think I think I know what it means. I don't know everything it means, but there's some things I do know. And so, well, I'm going to try to explain them, and then you can decide for yourself if they make sense and if they make sense in a way that's actually useful and meaningful.

It's certainly being the case in my life that when I study the deep stories of our cultures, they're an endless source of revivifying revelation. And what I mean by that is that understanding them straightens out your pathway forward and illuminates your relationships and makes you more resilient in the face of trouble and gives you a place to put things in your imagination and helps you understand how you might be able to draw the best even out of your suffering. And, you know, that's an awful lot of benefit.

And so that's been my personal experience. And really without end, you know, I started a deep analysis of, deep as I'm capable, deep analysis of literary stories and religious stories 40 years ago. And for me, it's been nothing but an endlessly deepening benefit. And I think the effects of that, at least in part, can be seen in the popular. of the discussions that I've had about such stories, first with my classes at Harvard and at the University of Toronto and in my clinical practice and then in the broader public realm.

You know, the fact of the attractiveness of these interpretations, the strange attractiveness of these interpretations indicates to me something like illustration of their eternal utility I suppose that's also in combination with the fact that they've been remembered for thousands of years and some of the stories, the really ancient stories, stories of Adam and Eve, for example, or Noah, they're probably tens of thousands of years old. And unless humanity is rotten to the core in some fundamental sense, which is not a story I buy, then there's a reason that those stories lodged themselves in our collective

memory immovably and they've been transmitted down the generations for as long back into the past as we can peer. In this part of Genesis, this is in the story of Abraham. Abraham is a man who's called forth by God to have the adventure of his life. And that's an interesting idea in and of itself, especially when you understand it. And I kind of like to approach these things. things biologically to begin with, because I think that's kind of amusing, given that the scientific or the biological approach is often used to justify standing in opposition, let's say, to the religious enterprise. I think that's ill-advised personally, partly because I think that truth is a structure of unity and that as we approach the truth, we find that pieces of what we understood

that appeared to exist in opposition to each other existed in that opposition because we misunderstood, we misunderstood the nature of reality at a deep level and that if we understood things properly, there would be no intrinsic conflict, let's say, between the scientific enterprise that enables us to predict and control the world with ever-increasing sophistication and the structures of value that orient us in the pursuit of the meaning of our lives. I don't believe that one of those will be finally sacrificed to the other, or that that sacrifice is necessary. And one of the criteria by which I've determined to pursue the truth is that the interpretive, that I regard as plausible have to work in relationship to multiple levels of analysis

simultaneously. It's so if the interpretations contradict the basic laws of science, neuropsychology, neuropsychophthalmichology, evolutionary biology, they're not correct. And if they contradict, if the explanations that I'm putting forward aren't in keeping with the deepest moral intuitions laid forth in our traditional societies and in the substructure of our political systems, then they're not correct. Things have to line up like they do in a musical piece where everything finds its proper place. And so Abraham is the man who's called to the adventure of his life.

And that's actually the definition of God in the story of Abraham. And that's something very much worth knowing. it's very difficult for modern people to understand what it means for something divine to make itself known to them in the confines of their life. People often believe that if they're wavering in their religious conviction, that if only God showed himself to them, they would immediately be believers. And that's not as true as you think it is, because even if something miraculous occurred for you once, you'd forget about it quite quickly and return to your old ways. but you can find the guiding voice of the divine in your life on a regular basis in some ways if you know where to look and if you understand what it means to find that

and the story of Abraham is one in one representation of how that might occur and so when we first meet Abraham who's the father of the Abrahamic religions he's a he's a man who's certainly passed his prime. And so he's lived much of his life in infantile security. That's really how the story puts it forward. He's the son of, he's the spoiled son of a rich father. He has privilege. And because of that, he spent literally 75 years living in the basement of his father's tent, you know, right? Because he has everything he hypothetically needs. And that begs the question

immediately, well, what is it that you really need? And if everything that you need is provided for you you so that you're satiated, let's say you have enough to eat, you have enough to drink, you have shelter, perhaps you need nothing else. And The political utopians who offer people an easy solution to the problems of scrabbling for existence seem to predicate their offering on the belief that really what we want is for our hunger to be satisfied and a roof over our heads. And, you know, much as it's unpleasant to be deprived and even viciously unpleasant to be to be arbitrary, deprived, there's no reason whatsoever to assume that we would be or should be satisfied by being satisfied infants. And that's really what Abraham concludes. And to some degree,

to the degree that you advance forward continually out of your zone of comfort, you make exactly the same, you draw exactly the same conclusion. If you're a good parent, if you're a good father, if you're a good mother, you don't strive merely to provide for your children everything they could conceivably want forever. What you strive to do is to encourage within them the development of the impetus for independence and the productive adventurousness that goes along with that. And you do that, knowing that you don't want children who only want from you everything that they need.

You want children who can provide for themselves, and more than that, you want children who can not only provide for themselves, but who have enough strength of character and enough ability and enough sense to organize themselves so that not only can they provide for themselves, but that they might have something to offer some friends and a potential romantic partner, a wife and a husband, and eventually children, and something maybe outside of that even for their community and their state and their nation

and maybe for God himself. And in consequence of that, you are on the side of the spirit that calls your children to the adventure of their lives. and that's how God is presented in the story of Abraham. So Abraham is in comfort in his father's tent at the beginning of the story, and God comes to him and says, you've got to stop this. You got to get up and you've got to get away from everything that you know

and that you are familiar with. And you have to go out into the world. And you did that to the degree that you matured and left your family and found a partner and established your own family or your own enterprise and more than that and this is also how these stories work you do that every moment of your life when you decide that instead of residing in mere comfort you'll stand on the edge and work to make of yourself more than you are and you don't do that where it's comfortable you do that where it's interestingly uncomfortable, right? And we want that more than anything else. That's, that's so

interestingly, because that call to adventure also simultaneously is a call to what we would want to call to us if we were acting with our best interest in mind. You don't want to be comfortable. You don't want to have everything that you need at hand. You want to be challenged so that more of you is commanded to make itself manifest. And the reason that you want that is so that you can be prepared for anything that comes your way, but so that also so that you can set more and more possibility in order and expand your horizons as you move forward. And that's much more interesting than mere infantile satiation. And so that's what God is offering to Abraham. And what you have to understand is this is a definition of God. It's not a

a description precisely. It's a definition. And so here's something to contemplate. There's no difference between the voice of adventure that property calls to you and the voice of the divine itself. Imagine your favorite lecture. Dial that on one max, put that on steroids, and then add some cinematic elements to it. That's the best way I could describe a Peterson Academy lecture. I went to college because I had to. I'd go to Peterson Academy because I want to. I'm still paying off college from 10 years ago and I'm also still questioning the value that I got out of college. The traditional universities a lot of times it's just pretty dry. They don't bring the same energy as the professors at Peterson Academy. It is a completely different experience to learn from somebody

who actually wants to teach you. If you've been on the fence about this, this is the time. That thing that's calling to you, you won't have an answer for it unless you enroll and see for yourself. You have the opportunity to investigate that calling. Okay, so God's offer to Abraham comes with a set of associated offerings. The contract that God establishes with Abraham, this is what a covenant is. It's a contract. And I'll explain that. It's a contract.

It's a relational contract. And so what God tells Abraham is that if he has enough courage to leave where he's comfortable, there will be a set of consequences. And the consequences are actually rather magnificent, and this is what justifies the risk. And so what God tells Abraham is that if he ventures forward in good faith and makes the proper sacrifices, then he'll become the father of nations. Right. Okay, so that's quite the offer.

And so you could take that apart. It means that not only will he have children and they'll thrive, but his children will have children, and they'll have children, and they'll offer. and they'll thrive in a way that's expanding, and they'll thrive in a way that makes them the masters of their circumstance, because God tells Abraham, for example, that the land of Canaan, which is the land of the, what would you say, the land of Canaan is the land of those who have abandoned their relationship with the divide. God tells Abraham that the inhabitants of the land of Canaan will flee before his descendants.

And so the offer there is that if Abraham is courageous in his conviction, he'll deliver to his children a pattern of being that will enable them to be victorious wherever they make themselves present. Well, and that's what you want for your children, too, is you want them to embody a pattern of attention and action that is highly likely to make themselves successful wherever they go. Now you can imagine a predatory kind of success where I get what I need or want at your expense. That's a zero-sum game sort of accomplishment on my part. I have much, but you have nothing.

And the reason I have anything is because I've taken it from you. But that isn't what God offers to Abraham either. He says to Abraham, if you follow the voice of adventure when it calls to you, then you'll be a blessing to yourself. Well, so that's a good thing to know, because you could imagine that you move forward viciously and accrue your wealth and opportunity at the expense of other people. But the price you pay for that, let's say,

is that at least some of the time insofar as you're still human, you're at the mercy of the conscience that calls you out for your misbehavior. Or you could imagine that you move forward in a way that provides you, what you need and want, but you do it. It happens in a manner that simultaneously makes what you do extremely useful to the people around you. You know, one of the things that's really remarkable about your country and probably foremost among all the countries not only in the world now, but all the countries that have ever been, is that you Americans have done a very good job of acting out the proposition that that's

possible, the notion that you could make your fortune, let's say, but if you did it, in the proper manner, if you pursued the interest that would enable you to be, for example, a productive and generous entrepreneur, that your wealth would not only not come at the expense of other people, but would simultaneously make other people wealthy as you advanced. And you know that's the case, because your country is the richest country that there's ever been, even though a relatively small proportion of people in your country are also hyper-affluent. Right? So you got to have your cake and eat it to. And I would say, there's no reason to assume that your success has to come at the expense of the success of your family.

In fact, if you construed your success properly, you'd be successful in a way that would help your wife be successful, and then you'd both be successful in a way that would help your children be successful, and hopefully they would be successful in a way that would help their friends flourish, and that could just stack up and all the way up the hierarchy of social order. And we know that's possible because it happens in the Western democracies, and it particularly happens and continues to happen in your country. So it's not a pipe dream. And it's also the proper answer to the skeptics who say,

well, all wealth, let's say, is generated at the cost of the exploitation of others. It's like no true wealth is generated at the cost of the exploitation of others. That's not wealth. that's manipulation and some form of criminality and it doesn't sustain itself well across time and the wealth that your country is actually founded on in its most fundamental sense is not the wealth of the thieves and you can tell that oh you have to just move around your country and see how it's laid out it's productive and thriving in the main there's corruption of course there is in every system in every situation but but it's possible

for people to pursue the adventure of their life without doing that at the, not only without doing that at the expense of other people, but doing it in a manner that's of aid to other people. Look, imagine your child's on a team and a sports team, and, you know, maybe they're the best player. But let's imagine that they're better than the best player in some ways, so they have the skill that enables them to be the best player,

but they also have the social graces that enable them to be a good sport, right? a truly admirable athlete. And so what does that mean? Well, maybe they're the captain of their team and their voted captain as a consequence of popular acclaim. And the reason for that is that they help all their teammates and they pass to them when it's necessary so that someone else can share the glory. And they help the younger people on the team develop. And they even do that in a way so that when they're on the playing field, they're gracious to their opponents who they obviously need in order to play the game at all. And so not only are they skillful in what they do, but they're a credit to their team. And then when you watch them as a parent, you can be doubly proud,

not only because they have the skill necessary to get the job done, but because they do that in a way that multiplies the skill of everyone around them. And then you can say that you've succeeded as a parent and you can be properly celebratory when your child wins the championship because they've won two championships, and one is the one that constitutes the victory in the game, and the other is that one that constitutes the victory of the championship. their establishment of a pattern of play that will aid them in their entire life. We know this is the case. We know that this is possible. And that's what God tells Abraham is that if you follow the voice of adventure

without fail and make the proper sacrifices, that you can establish a mode of being that's maximally beneficial to you if you were treating yourself properly while simultaneously being the benefit that will benefit everyone else and that will transmit itself in an expanding form down the generations. That's what you hope if you're a mother, you know, if you're a stay-at-home mother, let's say, and you've sacrificed your own career to some degree to ensure that your children are well-situated.

You're playing the long game, right? You're hoping that the investment that you make in your children pays off in their thriving and then in the thriving of their children and so forth down the generations. And you have no idea how much you affect in eternity. by acting properly locally and the offer that God makes to Abraham is that if you follow the voice of adventure the pull of adventure forward then that pole manifested fully will produce those consequences and that's a good deal you know because Abraham has to ask himself why would I leave the comfort why would I leave comfort behind and the answer to that is there's there's something much better than comfort, right? There's challenge, voluntarily met.

You can think about that in the most fundamental sense, if you want, by placing the story of Abraham in the full context of Christianity. I mean, the Christian injunction, the demand of Christianity, is that people shoulder the burden of the entire, the burden of the pain of the world on their own shoulders. right? That's the ask. That's what it means to to voluntarily shoulder the cross. It means to face the challenge even of death,

and worse than that, the challenge of the confrontation with evil. And the eternal promise is that if you do that voluntarily, if you confront all that horror, that you see through the darkness to the light, and that the consequence of that is not only your redemption, but the redemption of mankind. And I think that's right. And I can't see how it can be any other way,

because the alternative hypothesis is that you could avoid the challenging realities of life and thereby protect yourself. And I see no evidence whatsoever that that's ever true. It's certainly not true locally day-to-day. You pay for everything you avoid. We know perfectly well on the clinical side of things that if you're terrified of your life, the way to lead you forward is to teach you how to confront the things

that you're avoiding. You get braver and better if you do that. And the limits to that aren't well defined. You know, the great men of history, the great individuals of history are people who face the worst terror that threatened them immediately and in the long term and maintained their upward orientation and told the truth

and led people out of tyranny and away from slavery toward the promised land. It's the eternal story of mankind, and it's the religious, it's the religious pathway forward towards the highest good. And that's what Abraham is asked to do. And along the way, he's asked to sacrifice. And he starts his adventure with the sacrifice. And the reason for that, and this is a very difficult thing to realize, but a very simple thing to grasp once you've understood it,

The reason for that is every time you step out of your zone of comfort and move forward into a new adventure, you'll have to sacrifice something. That's why you're afraid to do it. You know, imagine you have a job and you don't really like it. You know, you're bored by it and you feel, why are you bored? Because it suited you yesterday, but it doesn't suit you tomorrow. It doesn't call you forward to be more than you are. And so it pays the bills, let's say, and it provides for your family, but it's killing your soul.

And you have a dream to establish your own business, let's say. Who knows what your dream is? And you're afraid to do it because you'll have to sacrifice your security. And every time you step forward on something that's new and adventurous, you have to sacrifice your security. by definition. And you might say, why do that? And that's a very good question. And the answer is,

there's more to life than security by a large margin. Or you could say something slightly different. You could say the true security is not to be found in safety. And you know that if you have children. Because you don't do everything you can to make your children safe.

Not if you're sensible. You do what's reasonable to make them safe and then you do everything you can to make brave and confident. And there's no reason to assume that you wouldn't do the same thing to yourself if you took care of yourself properly because it's better to be brave and competent

than to be secure, partly because there is no security. There's no security apart from bravery and competence. And maybe enough bravery and competence is the security that brings security and opportunity to everyone.

And I think that that's the case. And that's what God tells Abraham. If you move forward and you make the proper sacrifices, then the world will lay itself at your feet. And that's the American dream, that's for sure. We believe that that's a possibility for everyone. We certainly hope that that's a possibility for our children. You know, and the wonderful thing about your country is that you believe that and you actually celebrate people in the Maine who have enough courage to do it. And look at what the consequence has been. No, for all the faults of the West. What are you going to trade it for? You know, anything that's ever made itself manifest? No,

why do people want to move here? For all its faults? Because for all its faults, it's a hell of a lot better than wherever they are now. That's an indication, you know. Well, not only is it 250 years of proof, practical proof, but your country emerged out of a matrix that produced a lot of other pretty good countries, roughly the countries of the Western world, and they've all been successful with the same set of proposition, so it's not like the evidence isn't in. Free people who take responsibility for their lives can produce the states that all think, the states and the psyches, that all things considered make life worth living. And that's the pattern that you are called upon to embody. And here's the thing that's so remarkable about Abraham's offer, or

about God's offer. He basically says to Abraham, if you pay attention to the call to adventure that will redeem you. I mean, there isn't anything you could possibly want more than that. And I said I would speak about that biologically. Well, we know that children have an impetus to maturity, right? They want to grow up. You know how happy children are when they do something difficult that indicates that they're now moving from being two to being three, of moving from toddlerhood to early childhood, mastering something they haven't mastered before, how pleased with themselves they are when they do that and how happy you are to see it. It's a manifestation of the instinct that drives them to further development.

And why wouldn't we have that instinct since we have the instinct to live? And why wouldn't that instinct make itself manifest to us in the confines of our day-to-day experience? How could it be any other way? And maybe what it does is make itself manifest to us by gripping our interest in something. and compelling us forward. You know, we have a dream. We have a vision of what could be. We have some sense of who we could be

if we developed ourselves fully. We have a glimmer of that, and it attracts our attention, and we dwell on it, and maybe we don't have the faith to pursue it, but we're pretty damn happy with ourselves when we manage it, and we're thrilled when we see someone we love do it.

And maybe we're jealous when we see it in our friends if they make it real, and we don't. And maybe that leads us into like an abyss of bitterness and resentment. and wasted life and foregone opportunity. And that's a kind of hell. And that's the consequence of what would we say, excess faithless security seeking. And that's not a good thing.

And so not only do we have what we would want if we really wanted what we should want at our fingertips, but we have a hell that could open up underneath us if we forego that opportunity. That's what Kane does, right? Cain makes second-rate sacrifices. He's not all in on his adventure. And the consequence of that is that he fails.

And he becomes bitter in consequence of that. And then resentful. And then murderous. And then his offspring become genocidal. And then the flood comes. Well, God makes Abraham a very good deal. And if you imagine that you would dare to presume that that which calls you forward to adventure was identical,

with divinity itself, and then if you put yourself into that pursuit, that you would set yourself right with the world and be a blessing to everyone around you. That seems a risk worth taking, especially if you consider the consequences of the alternative. You couldn't ask for anything more if you could ask for what you wanted

if you were sensible and cared for yourself. And that's the offer that God makes Abraham, to follow the dream of your life. and to make the sacrifices along the way. Well, why sacrifices? Well, you always have to let something go when you change. That's the definition of change, right? You know perfectly well that as you've matured

to the degree that you've matured, you mature because you let what's immature go when you move forward and you transform your personality as a consequence. And every time you step forward into a domain of expanded opportunity, you're called upon to make the requisite. sacrifice and they expand in scope as you move forward. Now, Abraham starts out as Abram and he's renamed as the sacrifices mount. And the reason for that in part is that as you transform when you move forward, you'll be called upon to transform enough so that it will be as if you're a new person.

Right? You've left so much of what trammeled you in the past behind that you're no longer even the same human being, right? It's like a baptism by fire, with your spirit purified by the consequential sacrifice of all your foolishness and immaturity and stupidity and bitterness and resentment. All that you have to shed as you move forward. And what's the consequence of that is that you exist in a never-ending expanse of increasing opportunity. Right. And that's a good vision of Jacob's Ladder that spirals you upward and away from the abyss. And it's a vision of paradise itself because paradise is a place that's good but still getting better. And that's what a life properly conducted is. And that's a

life that is a consequence of upward striving voluntary sacrifice in the name of the good. Right. And there's no difference between that and a covenantal relationship with the divide. Those are the same thing. how Abraham is called upon to make sacrifices and each time he has a transforming adventure the nature of the sacrifice mounts and the eternal story is that God will call upon you to sacrifice everything

in the name of your allegiance to what's highest and so Christ says in the Gospels for example that anyone who prefers his family prefers his mother and father and his brother to him will be rejected. It's a very harsh and strange thing to say, but what it means fundamentally is that,

and this is a matter of definition as well, is that as you move forward into the great beyond, let's say, pursuing what's good is that everything has to be sacrificed to what is yet better, and that there's no limit to the demand for that sacrifice. And so when we meet Abraham in the story that I'm going to relate to you now, he's called upon to make a sacrifice that approximates the ultimate sacrifice. Abraham has been promised that not only will he become a credit to himself,

that his name will be remembered and that he will be a credit to other people, but that he will be the father of nations. And he's an old man and childless when this promise is delivered to him. And after much travail and effort, his wife, Sarah, Sarai first, and then Sarah, because she's renamed as well, finally have a son, Isaac, and they're very old when this happens, far too old for this to actually happen, and yet it does. And they've strived for decades to have this child in the face of the catastrophe of their life,

and he's finally delivered to them, and they're thrilled beyond comprehension about this opportunity and regarded as a fulfillment of the promise of God and the in consequence of their sacrifices and this is what happens. And it came to pass after these things, the adventures of Abraham's life, that God did tempt Abraham and said, Abraham, and Abraham said, behold, here I am. And he said, take now thy son, thine only son, Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah, and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains, which I will tell thee of.

Well, this is a passage that the atheistic rationalists who hate the God of the Old Testament point to when they describe the cruelty of the deity upon which the Judeo-Christian culture is predicated. What sort of monstrous figure would call upon a great prophet, an acolyte to sacrifice the son that he loves? is a very complicated problem. To understand it, we first of all have to turn our understanding to an analysis of sacrifice itself.

So what does it mean to sacrifice? It means to give up something in the hopes of investment in something to come. A bank account is a sacrifice. Why? Well, because you put your money in the bank instead of spending it on hookers and cocaine now. Right, right, but I really mean this most, I mean this in the deepest possible sense, is that to, to sacrifice is to forego the pleasures of the moment for the stabilization of the future and the increase in opportunity in the future and the sake of the social community. So as you develop, you move away from the desire for immediate gratification for your whims to the ability to forego, gratification so you can stabilize yourself across time.

You save for your future, let's say, but at the same time, you do that also in service to the people around you, right? So you're concerned about you and yourself as you iterate in the future, but concerned as well with you and your wife and your family and then your community. And so you start to conduct yourself not so that you get exactly what you want right now, no matter what it is and no matter at who's expect. you get it to a pattern of activity that constitutes foregoing immediate gratification in service of the community and the future. That's a sacrificial gesture, and it's the sacrificial gesture upon which community itself is founded. Community by definition requires the sacrifice of the individual to the community. It's the definition of what constitutes communal. If you're a child who doesn't play well with others, you can't let other.

people take their turn. You only want to play the games that are your games in order to take your place in the social community. You have to offer up your immediate desires to a long-term and harmonious game. And so the community itself is predicated on sacrifice, just as your long-term psychological stability and opportunity is predicated upon sacrifice. Now, we dramatized this for thousands of years without understanding it explicitly in the least. And so I went to Jerusalem last year with a friend of mine, and we walked the Via Dolorosa, right, the pathway of the cross. And we ended up in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher,

which was the first Christian church founded on the site of Christ's crucifixion. And so at the center of the church is the place of sacrifice, and this church surrounds that, and surrounding the church is the church, the community and that's the foundation of the town and the reason for that is that we dramatized even in our architecture the notion that the community is founded on sacrifice and I told I mentioned to you already what the sacrifice means it's no different than work because work is a form of sacrifice and we know that the stability of life and the community is dependent upon work and the

question we must ask ourselves is what work suffices and in the story of Kane and Abel, Kane makes offerings or sacrifices that are second rate, and Abel makes the offerings that are of the highest quality, and he offers, he dramatizes as he acts it out because it's not explicitly understood. It's still enacted in ritual, and he takes the best that he owns, the best that he has, and in the case of Abel, who's a herdsman, he takes the unblemished firstborn of his flock, He takes the best cuts and the best parts of the best cuts, and he burns them and offers thou to God. And it's an archaic dramatization of sacrifice,

and it's predicated on the idea that the God who is above in the infinite expanse of heaven is pleased by receipt of the message that the best has been offered. And so that's a very anachronistic or archaic way of viewing the relationship with God and the communication there, but it has within it in a dramatic manner the seeds of the very profound truth, which is that you make your peace with the order of the world by offering continually what's best about you, what's most valuable that you have.

And then you might say, well, what's the ultimate possible offering of value? And you can contemplate that quite rapidly. To offer the best is to offer yourself. That's one answer to that question, and everything that's best about you to offer that wholeheartedly and without reservation and with courage. But an equally profound offering is that of your child.

And you might say, well, what does it mean to offer your child to God? And I would say, well, that's what you do if you're a parent and you have any sense. This is particularly true of mothers. And so I went to St. Peter's in Rome and in St. Peter's, there's a great statue. The paella that Michelangelo carved

out of the single block of marble when he was 24. salute genius at 24 and Mary is larger than life and a beautiful woman, a mother who's portrayed in this beautiful sculptural position seated with the broken body of her son in her arms, looking serene and outward. And I've often regarded the paeda as the female equivalent of the crucifixion. And the reason for that is there's nothing more painful than no offering of your child to the world. And I mean literally nothing more painful, given that most parents would die if it meant they could prevent the death of their children. And so it's an open question, whether the full offering of yourself is the highest

sacrifice or the full offering of your child. And one of the fascinating things about the story of the crucifixion is that it's both sacrifices at once. And perhaps God makes the most painful sacrifice, which is the sacrifice of the child. No, and the combination of the sacrifice of child, and the combination of the sacrifice of child and the self is, you could say, the ultimate sacrifice, and it's the ultimate sacrifice that's most pleasing to the divine. And what does it mean to offer your child to God or to sacrifice your child to God? And it means to let them go, to encourage them, to what? To go out into the world and have the adventure of their life and be broken because of it, because that's what will happen? But what's the alternative? What eternal? What would you say,

desperation of the eternally juvenile? We're seeing what the consequences of that are in our society. Now, the desperate failure to launch, people who sustain their adolescence into their 50s and are brutally bitter and murderous and cane-like and vengeful as a consequence. If you're a good mother, what did the psychoanalyst say in the 1920s? The good mother necessarily fails. Well, what does that mean?

Well, when your child is six months old, you should be doing everything you can to care for them for every moment. But by the time they're a year, it's time to expose them to the catastrophes of life, right? You want to do that on the edge? You don't want to overwhelm them with challenge, but you certainly don't want to protect them from it.

You want to watch them and establish a relationship with them so that you can see them dancing on the edge and have the courage to facilitate that holy even though it might break your heart to watch them leave. And your heart's supposed to be broken. Right? And what's the offering? Well, if you let your children go, you'll get them back. And that is what happens insofar as you can get them back, or maybe insofar as you even want them back. Because if you have any sense, well, seriously, if you have any sense, you don't want a 55-year-old,

seven-year-old in your basement. So God says to Abraham, look, you have to offer up even your son. And Abraham thinks, well, that's a hell of a fine deal. I've been working myself to the bone to make sure that this child appears. And this is going to be pretty hard on my wife, who's like 85 when she finally gives birth. And yet I will continue this sacrificial pattern of my life. And so up they go to the mountain. Abraham rises up early in the morning and saddles his ass and talks.

took two of the young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him. On the third day, Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place so far off, and Abraham said to his young men, abide ye here with the ass, and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, celebrate, devote ourselves to what's highest, and come again to you. And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it upon Isaac his son, and took the fire in his hand and a knife, and they made him,

both went together. You know, and this is, if maybe you take your son for the first time to a, to an organized soccer game or a baseball game and he's a bit timid and you, and he comes with you anyways, even though he's afraid and introverted, maybe a little bit on the, you know, anxious side. And you stand with him and he's, has enough faith in you to accompany you to wherever go and you push him forward and you say, you know, look, kid. This is frightening and it's challenging, and it seems like it's a bit beyond you, but I can do it. And he walks, your son in good faith, walks forward with you towards his destiny, right?

And that's what you attempt to foster as a father. And you're certainly sacrificing his childhood to do that. You sacrifice his childhood so that something greater can take its place. And that's a true sacrifice and a true loss. And every mother has her moment of pain when she leaves her child for the first day at school because she knows that the toddlerhood is over. And that time of life has passed. And there's some genuine sorrow in that.

And if she has any sense, she does it with a smile that masks her sorrow and maybe goes home to cry, but is thrilled that, you know, she's going to lose this creature who she's invested everything in. And that's what lends her motherhood more than a touch of heroism, right? That willingness to sacrifice towards the child's better nature, regardless in some sense of the cost. And the cost of placing your child out in the world is always the totality of your child. You're always offering your child to death and to the evil of the world. We know that so many women now decide not to have children.

They say, well, who would dare to bring a child? child into a world such as this. Despite the fact the world is now better and easier than it's ever been in the entire history of mankind, a conscious mother is still going to ask yourself whether the price of entry into this world of toil and trouble is worth the investment. And the mother who follows the pattern of Mary, who's called upon to become the mother of God, is the woman who says that even if the price is catastrophe in hell, the provision of the child is eternally worthwhile, and it's that decision upon which society itself depends.

And we have to understand that there's heroism in that and faith. And Isaac spake unto Abraham's father and said, My father, and he said, here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the word and the fire. But where is the lamb for a burnt offering? And Abraham said, my son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering, so they went both of them together, and they came to the place where God had told him of, and Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac

his son, and laid him upon the altar on the wood. And Abraham stretched forth his hand and took his knife to slay his son. And the angel of the Lord called unto him out of heaven and said, Abraham, Abraham, and he said, here am I, and he said, lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do anything to him. For now I know thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me. And Abraham lifted up his eyes and look, and behold him behind a ram caught in a thicket by his horns. And Abraham went up and took the ram and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son. And Abraham called the name of that place Jehovah Gere, and it is said to this day, in the mount of the Lord, it shall be seen.

and the angel of the Lord called unto Abraham out of heaven the second time and said by myself have I sworn saith the Lord for because thou hast not done this thing or hast done thy thing this thing and hast not withheld thy son thine only son that in blessing I will bless thee and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven and as the sand which is upon the seashore and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies and thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed because as thou hast obeyed my voice. Well, what sort of son do you want to raise for that son to be the sort of man who will attract a woman who will want to be with him and a man who can produce the children that you'll admire as their grandfather? And the children who can attract their own mates

and establish their own families and so on down the generations. And the answer to that question is embedded in the story. And the answer to the question is that you establish the pattern of sacrifice that even sacrifices your children themselves to what's highest, because in that sacrifice, the pattern that ensures the propagation of the generations

is to be established. And what happens as a consequence? Well, Abraham gets his son back. And more than that, there's a miraculous transformation in ritual conduct that occurs simultaneously, and it's the establishment of the principle of substitutionary sacrifice. And this is a transformation of immense significance, that it's the beginning of the transformation of the idea of the ritual of sacrifice

out of the domain of concrete dramatization and into the realm of the psychological. You fight with your wife, and you fight with your wife because there's something wrong with your personality. You fight with your wife because a spirit of resentment and deception inhabits you. And your wife could sacrifice the marriage to solve that problem. And you could sacrifice your relationship with your wife to free her from the dominion of your devil, let's say. Or you could sacrifice what's worst about you instead and allow the relationship to continue.

And that's a form of substitutionary sacrifice. and this is what we've learned to do as modern human beings, as the religious enterprise has developed and unfolded, is that as we've become more and more sophisticated, we've learned that instead of sacrificing ourselves in the concrete manner, that the original ritualistic sacrifices demanded to offer up, for example, the immolation of the best of our flocks to God, we can offer up the fragments of ourselves that are unworthy to be burned in the

divine fire so that we can move ourselves forward as increasingly sinless creatures towards this expanding horizon of opportunity. And that was a transformation in attitude that took humanity thousands and thousands of years to manage to see the psychological equivalent, let's say, of confession. This is what's wrong with me. Of the desire to reconcile, and that's atonement, and the offering of what's insufficient about the self to be demolished so that we move forward and develop, right? That's the benefit of thought itself, right? And why do we think? And what do we criticize our thoughts? We think so that we can come

up with new selves and we think critically so that our stupid ideas can die instead of us. And that's a substitutionary sacrifice that's pleasing to God. And it's the hallmark of movement forward and adaptation

itself. To let go of everything about you that's an obstacle to your own progress as new adventures and opportunities beckon. And that's not a straightforward thing to manage and it often means or sometimes means you have to literally give up what you love most right but that's still holding you back the identity that you have now sometimes the friends you have sometimes the career that's offering you security sometimes even members of

your family who's who's a relationship with whom cannot be maintained if you're continuing to abide by the voice that guides you to the adventure of your life The continual sacrificial movement up the Holy Mountain towards the beckoning gates of paradise, right? The city of Jerusalem on the hill. That's the pattern of life. That's what God offers Abraham is a secession of expanding opportunities accompanied by a secession of sacrifices of increasing magnitude, with the promise offered that if that voyages, undertaken wholeheartedly and in good faith, then there's no limit to the degree to which uphill

progress can be made manifest. And it's the opposite of a vision of hell, and we all know, and this is something to note that we all believe, we know perfectly well that there's no situation that's so bad that there isn't something stupid you can do to make it worse. And you certainly see that in your own life, And you see that in the collapse of states themselves. You see that in the tyrannical doubling down, let's say, of states like Stalinist Russia, where things got so bad in the 1920s that people were literally cannibalizing their own children. And there was still new bottoms that could be discovered as a consequence of people's failure to make the adventure of their own life manifest.

There's no bottom to the abyss. That's why hell is a bottomless pit. Nothing is so bad that you couldn't make it worse. And the corollary of that perhaps is that if you followed the voice that called you to be everything you could be, that there would be no heaven so great that you couldn't still improve it. And you can ask yourself whether you believe that. You could say to yourself, for example, you could be much better than you are, and everyone knows that and calls themselves out on their conscience for failure to reach that.

but you could ask yourself simultaneously. Certainly know that to the degree that you have a family. How much better would the people around you be if you were better than you are? And then you could ask, well, what's the limit to that? If you were everything you could be, how much better would everyone around you be? And what would happen if everyone did that? Instead of whatever it is that we're doing, playing both ends against the middle, right? Sitting on the fence and swaying in the wind,

refusing to voice what we have to voice when we're called upon because of our cowardly alliance with what gives us false security, refusal to have enough faith to pursue the adventure of our life. And why does it take faith? Well, what do you know about what might happen? You always step into the abyss when you're moving forward and you do that with insufficient information. You don't get married because you know what's going to happen. And even if you thought you knew what was going to happen. that doesn't mean you knew what was going to happen.

You might have thought you knew who you were when you got married, but you certainly didn't, and neither did your wife. And both of you are still discovering both of those, and maybe you try to put each other in a box so you could remain predictable and secure, but all that does is bore you to the point of despair and take the spirit out of your relationship. And so you step forward in your marriage, as you do with all major decisions in your life.

life from a position of ignorance and why do you step forward in consequence since you can't compute the results and the answer is well what do you have faith in and maybe you have faith in the spirit of adventure that calls you forward to become who you are and you either have faith in that or you have faith in the contrary spirit because that's the only choices that you have and the fact that you're ignorant and finite and limited means that you're never going to have all the information at your disposal. And so the faith you need to manifest in order to set your life straight isn't the idiot willingness to believe a pack of superstitious lies, but the existential courage to set yourself forward in the manner that straightens you out and makes you more than you are, despite the fact that you have

no idea what the consequences will be. One of the things I understood, this is a lovely thing to know. First, we've established that the spirit that calls you to be everything you are is the spirit that calls you to the adventure of your life. And the promise of that adventure is that you could be not only everything you could be, but that for everyone else as well, which is a fine offer. But there's another layer of depth to that that's associated with faith. And that's the analysis of something approximating the truth. Abraham aims up and he tries to live in truth. And what does it mean to live in truth? It's a form of continual sacrifice. Imagine that you conducted your life so that you cease to a Imagine what would happen if you used your words and actions merely to obtain what you wanted.

And you'd determined to act instead so that all you did was lay out what you believed to be true with every gesture and utterance at every moment. Well, what would that mean? It mean you'd have to sacrifice what you think you could gain by using your words to manipulate. And what would you gain? You'd gain whatever would happen if you told the truth. well imagine this imagine that if you told the truth if you lived in truth that you'd align yourself

with the spirit of reality itself well what would happen to you if you aligned yourself with the spirit of reality itself and the answer to that would be it would exceed the limits of your wildest dreams and so that decision to abide

by the spirit of adventure that calls to you in the decision to abide by the truth leads you to the adventure of your life, which is a place of ever-expanding horizon and the requisite sacrifices. And the value of that is so high that it makes security and wealth, for that matter, pale by comparison. Christ compares the kingdom of heaven to the pearl of great price. And the pearl of great price is a single pearl that any man, no matter how wealthy would,

that's so valuable that any man, no matter how wealthy, would sacrifice everything. to purchase that one thing. And what's that? Well, how about a life so intrinsically and deeply meaningful that it's a miracle as it unfolds? And what if that was the case that that would be there for you if you followed the voice of the spirit of adventure?

And why wouldn't that be the case? Because you know perfectly well if you consult your conscience that in the times of your life where you dared to do that, you did find your best self. And you found those experiences, adventures that you could rely on when the demons of despair come calling and ask you what you've made

of your life and you go through the banks of your memory and you say to yourself, well, I dared to live once and this is what happened. What would it be like if you did that all the time? Well, that's the offering that God makes Abraham is that everything you could imagine would lay itself out in front of you. And you'd see the world for what it is. And that's what the kingdom of God, whose contours are hidden by the blindness of men. And you see glimmers of that, you know, they attract you by attracting your attention or they make themselves manifest

when you're apprehending someone or something that you love, right? You see the reality of the world make itself manifest most clearly in those situations. It's obscured and hidden from you by your own ignorance and sin, the remainder of the time. If you follow the pathway of challenge to the place of men,

maximal development, the scales fall from your eyes and you can see the pathway forward in a manner that's ever more clear and that will make of you the person who's capable of bearing the catastrophe of your own existence voluntarily and gratefully and joyfully and to develop into what you could be and to be a blessing to everyone else. And that's the truth. And so you sacrifice everything that you have and everything that you are and everything that you love to God who calls upon you to do that and the reason that you do that is because only a fool wouldn't sacrifice what was lesser for what was greater. And the injunction in the Old Testament and re-presented in the Gospels in the New Testament is that you're called upon to let everything within you that isn't

perfect go in celebration and worship of what is highest. In the Old Testament, the voice that calls you to do so makes itself manifest in two manners. One of those is illustrated in the story of Abraham, in the insistence that God calls to you with the voice of adventure. God is to be found in the calling that lightens the pathway forward, right? That illuminates you, right? That it's the place that meaning makes itself manifest in your life. And you see that when you're in love.

You see that when you're interacting with someone you care for. And maybe you're terrified of that, terrified enough of the love of your children, which calls you to be much better than you are, that you reject it because the pain of being what they want is so great because of everything you'd have to abandon about yourself to live up to that. You'll forego that opportunity. If people do that with their children all the time, it's a complete bloody catastrophe for them and their children.

But to allow that transformational process to take place means that everything that makes you weak in the face of the travails of life will disappear, painful as that purification process will necessarily be. And your conscience as well, it's the secondary voice of God. That's a good way of thinking about it. The calling asks you to move forward in accordance with the spirit of adventure, and the conscience is the voice of God within telling you when you deviate from the path. And the God of the Old Testament is presented in those stories,

the interaction between calling and conscience that guides us forward. And that's there for everyone. And everyone knows it because you know that things grip your attention and ask you to move forward. And you know that you call yourself out on your inadequacies. And you aren't required to do either of those, right? It's an optional choice because you have free will. But the promise that's laid forward in the biblical corpus

is that if you follow the calling and you abide by the devil, dictates of your conscience, that your life will be a never-ending expanse of increased opportunity as well as necessary sacrifice that will actually only remove from you every impediment to your further progress. Right. And so that's the promise that that's the definition of God in the story of Abraham. And that's very, think about that as a, as a hypothesis or a bet. You can watch how what compels you forward makes itself manifest in your dreams, in your innermost desires. You can consult with yourself to see what it is that you need and want. If you were treating yourself properly and you can dare to walk one step forward,

one foot in front of the other, incrementally to make that possibility real. And the offer is that everything that could manifest, everything that could make itself manifest within you as the income, incarnation of the divine spirit of your ancestors will make itself manifest in you. And you'll get that merely by doing what it is that your soul most longs to do. And how could that possibly be a better offer? And you can bolster your conviction to do that by considering the alternative, which are already laid out.

Lose the pathway forward and descend. And as you descend, become ever more bitter and work for the destruction of all things. That's the divine world of what, good and evil that we all inhabit. That's the landscape of narrative that lays itself out in the Old Testament corpus,

and that is the true description of the earthly garden that human beings inhabit and move through. That's the story of Abraham. Thank you very much. Thank you, everyone. Do you need me to pour some water on? First question.

I'm a cop. What is one piece of advice you can give to law enforcement officers in the United States? Made them think. So in the story of Exodus, you have a leader, right? You have a leader who, Moses is the leader. And the reason that Moses is the archetype of the leader, you could think of Abraham in some ways as the archetype of the individual. Moses is the archetype of the leader. And the leader always does the same thing, which is why Moses is archa-tipple.

The leader confronts tyranny, which you all do to one degree or another. Could be the tyranny that you impose on yourself. It could be the tyranny that your wife imposes on you or vice versa, or that you impose on each other. It could be the tyranny of your workplace or your state. It doesn't matter. One of the things we confront eternally as human beings is this, spirit of tyranny. And we simultaneously do what we can to free ourselves and those we love from the attractions of slavery. And a tyrant needs willing slaves. And so to lead people is to lead them

away from tyranny and also away from the attractions of slavery. And the attractions of slavery are something like irresponsible security. Right. And so we're all called upon to do that. And Moses is called upon by God to do that, and he's called upon to lead in the proper manner. And Moses is subject to a temptation. Most of the biblical prophets have their temptation, have their weaknesses, like we all do, right? I mean, every gift that you've been granted will be associated with an equivalently potent temptation. So, for example, if you're wildly intelligent, you have the Luciferian temptation, and the Luciferian temptation is to presume that your intellect should rule, right? And so that's the price you pay for being granted, the privilege of being intelligent.

Moses is a leader, and he wrestles with the temptation of power. And at the beginning of the Exodus account, Moses has taken his slavish people away from the recalcitrant Pharaoh out in to the desert. And the reason for that is that that's where you go after you abandon tyranny. So one of the things you might ask yourself is why do people remain subject to tyranny, their own and communal tyranny? Why don't they stand up and oppose it? And the answer is, well, there's proximal risk, right? Because if you stand up against what's tyrannical, you might get smacked down, especially if you're in cautious. But there's something more subtle lurking as a threat, and that is you don't go from the tyranny to the promised land.

You go from the tyranny of certainty to the desert of uncertainty, and the Israelites end up there for 40 years, even though it's a two-week journey. And what this means is that sometimes everything that you understood that constrained you falsely collapses, and you're not free, you're bereft. And that's a form of freedom, because you're nowhere, no longer dominated by that tyranny, but you're aimless and directionless and wandering, and that's what happens to the Israelites in the desert. And they're there for a long time, three generations, and they're bitchy, as you can possibly

imagine. And all they do is squawk and moan and complain and fight with each other and long for the good old days of Stalinist provision and shake their fist at God and whine about Moses and want to turn around and lose faith and worship false idols. and party naked in the desert and like pride parade. And so Moses is trying to keep them together, right? But he's got this temptation to use force because he's in a position of authority. He falls prey to that several times in his life.

When he's a young man, he kills an Egyptian who is harassing one of his Hebrew brothers and he has to flee the country. Moses is a powerful man and is capable of using force. and God tells him repeatedly, don't use force when persuasion is a possibility. Don't fall prey to the temptation of power. And at the end of Moses sojourn, he's gone through the desert for 40 years. He's been a devoted servant of God pursuing a difficult destiny

with a fractious group of ungrateful acolytes. And he's right at the threshold of the end of the journey. He's right on the boundary of the promised land itself, and the Israelites still in the desert run out of water yet again. And they get all bitchy and whiny, and even though they're damn near where they're supposed to be, they want to turn around and they start getting fractious. And it's the whole faithless catastrophe. And they come to Moses and say, we don't have any water again. And you know, you promised to deliver us and God isn't delivering and what the hell's going on? Do you think you could intercede? And Moses has had just about enough of them at this point

because they're pretty bloody, pathetic and contemptible. But he goes to God anyways and he says, your people are lacking the water of life. What do I need to do to provide it? And God says, speak to the rocks in the desert and the water will come forth. And so Moses goes to the rocks that are indicated and he strikes them twice with his staff, right, with the rod of tradition that God, guides him as he moves through the desert. And the consequence of that is that the water comes forth and Moses is sentenced to die before he enters the land of milk and honey. Why?

Don't use force when you can use your words. Right. Well, that's good advice for policemen. What role do dreams play in our life? And how can we use them to see God? So Freud believed that dreams were mysterious because they attempted to hide from us the unpalatable truths of our deepest desires. And dreams can do that. But Jung, Carl Jung, his greatest student, his greatest colleague, said, no, the dream attempts to make the completely incomprehensible more.

comprehensible. So imagine this. There's a domain of things you understand and can predict and control. And then there's a domain of things that not only do you don't know, you don't know them. They're so far beyond your comprehension that you don't even have the questions. And then there's an intermediate area, which is like the boundary between what you know and what you don't know. And that's where the dream operates. And so the dream is the matter of in which our thought extends itself before we can say what we think explicitly.

Now, you can see this in children because children play out their dreams and they inhabit a dreamlike world and what they're trying to do is they're formulating their explicit conceptions in imagination. And the imagination is how they think before they can think explicitly.

So we dream the world before we live in it in an explicable and verbally comprehensible manner. The unknown, the ritual, the drama, the dream, the story, the poem, the explicable world. It's a hierarchy of transformation of knowledge.

What children do when they first encounter something they don't understand is acted out. That's what we've, done historically. That's what our forefathers did when they acted out the drama of sacrifice. They didn't know how to formulate what a sacrifice was explicitly and they acted it out. We act things out. We don't understand in our imagination. That's what you do when you dream. And I mean this literally, this is what dreams are for. When you dream at night, you're paralyzed. There's a little electronic switch, so to speak, that's turned on when you dream so that when you're

moving in your dream, you don't move. And that's a little electronic switch, so to speak, that's turned on when you dream. And there's been experiments done with cats. Cats were often the targets of such experiments. You can take out that switch. And then when the cats dream, they run around. Come on, that's not good, because, of course, their eyes are closed, and they're asleep, and they run into things. That's not good.

That weak them up. When you're dreaming, you're paralyzed, except your eyes. Your eyes move rapidly when you're dreaming, indicating the grip of action by the dream, but doesn't matter that your eyes move because you're not going to be. going to do yourself any damage as a consequence. So you're acting out the realm of possibility when you dream. And most of what you dream is strange and mysterious because it's exploratory and daring, right? And you practice in your dream what you could in potential make manifest

in your life. And you experiment in your dream. And that's what we would do when we go to movies, because movies are collective dreams, is we experiment with possibility before we embody it and act it out. And the realm of imagination is a place where you experiment with possibility before you acted out. It's a domain of fantastic thought.

It's part of the adaptive process that constitutes thinking. And so your dreams are where you extend yourself into the unknown. Now, you can think about this practically. So here's an exercise. You can try this. I formalized this exercise in this.

series of online activities that you can undertake at a site called self-authoring.com. So we live in our dreams. So what does that mean? What means we're visionary creatures? You have to inhabit a vision of the world. The vision includes a destination that you hypothetically wish to attain, and that would be a goal that motivates you. And you might ask, well, how do you dream up a vision?

And you do what Christ says to do in the gospel. you knock and the door will open, or you ask and the question will reveal itself, or you seek and you'll find. And so how do you do that? And the answer is by doing it. And so you can try this. Here is something you can do

the next time you fight with your partner. You can tell them, if I could offer you what it is that would satisfy you, in consequence of that argument, what would it be? And then your partner can go and think, okay, I'm fighting about something.

What in the world do I actually want? And then that, and it might be, I want to win, and that's not wise, because you actually don't want to defeat your husband, not least because you have to live with him. And so defeat, repeated defeat of your partner is not a winning strategy. Right? So you might ask yourself,

if this altercation could produce the most desirable possible, and all things considered, what is it that I would have to obtain? And you'll have a vision, what is it I want? It might take a while for it to make itself clear, it might take overnight, it might take a couple of days of thinking, and you can go to your partner and say, well, it seems to me that if this is what you offered me,

then I would have what I wanted. And if the person is acting in good faith, which you hope they are, then that might be the solution. to the argument. That's the formulation of a vision. You can do that more broadly in your own life. And in this future authoring program, we tried to formalize this. It's like, well, what should you do with your life? How would you formulate a vision that would inspire you and keep you moving forward through the obstacles of your life? And the answer is, well, you ask yourself. It's like, okay, under what conditions would you be willing to do the effort to put yourself together? You can ask

yourself that. And I mean literally, it's like, okay, here's the deal. In five years, you can have what you want, need. Now, we're going to put a couple of assumptions in place. You're going to treat yourself properly while you're formulating this vision. And it has to be within the bounds of the conceivable. Right. So you have to be as reasonable as you can manage in consort with your desires. You could imagine to yourself, if I put my life together in a manner that I would find maximally compelling, how would it look? You can do that with your wife. It's like, what do you want? Five years for now, you can have what you want, but there's a rule. You have to identify it, including what you want for me. And I want you to go think about it genuinely, right? So to open yourself up to see if you can understand what it is that would

satisfies someone like you. In the future authoring program, we differentiate that for people to some degree because it's a pretty overwhelming question, right? What do you want and need? That can stop people in their tracks because it's a question of such magnitude.

But the alternative to answering it is to blow in the wind, right? It's to be at the whim of the things that are happening immediately around you. And that's not a good plan. So I might say, well, if you're marriage was everything it could be, what would that look like? And then you might want to

specify that. One of the things I used to do with my clients, for example, one of the ways of specifying that is imagine the things you do every day in your marriage. Those are the things that make up your life. It isn't the exceptions in your life that make up your life. It's the things you repeat. So maybe you come home every day from work, let's say. That's something that people generally do. And then there's a transition period of, say, 20 minutes when you first arrive home. So let's say it's 20 minutes. And so it's 100 minutes a week, or 400 minutes a month, or 4,800 minutes a year. And so that's 80 hours. That's two full work weeks. So the time you spend coming home is 2% of your life. So you just have to have 50 things like that. That's your whole life.

Okay, so if you were greeted the way that would maximally motivate you when you arrived at home, what would that look like? And you have to ask, and that's terrifying, because you might have to reveal to yourself your vulnerabilities, right? You have to admit to yourself what would actually speak to you. You'd have to admit that, well, what do you want? You want a sandwich. You want a, you want a beer. You want to hug. You want to talk for 10 minutes.

You want to be left to hell alone. Well, you have a shower. I don't know what you want. Maybe you do. And then you could figure out what that was and you could negotiate toward it. And then you could have that. You'd have 2% of your life. Fixed.

And you do that 50 times. And man, you've got the whole thing in order. And then maybe your marriage is made up of 10 things like that. Really, that would make up like 80% of your marriage. You know, like what are your romantic interludes with your wife like? Well, hopefully they. repeat, do you have them in order? Are they right? Are they what you want? Or is your imagination and your dreams leading you to pursue something else? And if so, why? And so maybe you could sort that out

and negotiate with your wife and find out what she wants and see if jointly you could come together and produce a dreamer of a vision that would flesh out the romantic portion of your life. And then bang, you've got another 10% under control. And maybe you could think about that with your friendships. and you could think about that with your family relationships and your education and your time outside work and how you take care of yourself and the service you present to your community and you could sit and ask yourself,

okay, if I could set my life in order the way that I would like to live it, which means you could live your life and all its difficulties without being bitter and resentful and looking forward to the opportunity, what do you want? Well, and that's a dream. right? That's a vision and you can develop that. And then you can work towards it. And then it'll make itself, it'll realize itself if you're willing to make the

attendant sacrifices along the way. And that is really how you follow your calling and your conscience. And there's, I've seen this many, many times and talked to hundreds of people who've tried exactly this sort of thing, you know. You can hit what you aim at. You know what sin means in three different languages? Sin is always derived from an archery term. It means to miss the target.

Well, one way you miss the target is by not specifying the target. And you do that to some degree because of laziness and to some degree because of lack of faith. You might think, well, you know, I don't really want to admit to myself what I want because, first of all, I might not get it and that would be terrible. Second, I might betray myself along the way, so it's best just to keep myself blind so I don't understand that I'm, so that I don't understand my failure. Jesus, brutal. Better to aim and miss and re-ame, you know? At least you learn along the way

and your accuracy and your calibration will improve if you aim. And when you make a plan to begin with and flesh out a dream, it's going to be a little off-kilter because what the hell do you know? But as you move towards it, you know, if you do that, this is what happens to Abraham.

You know, he's a pretty flawed person when he first starts moving forward. He makes lots of mistakes. He lies about his wife when the Egyptian prince attempts to essentially kidnap her and bring her into his harem because he's too much of a coward to stand up against her,

you're going to be a fool when you first start to lay out your vision, but if you attempt that in good faith, you'll adjust your vision and your actions, and, you know, you'll deviate less and less from the pathway forward as you move, and the goal will move as well, and that's a fine deal.

And so, well, that's what you have for your dream and your vision and that's what orients you in your life and that's what dreams are for. A dream you live in a dream. If you don't live in your dream you're living in someone else's and it might not be the dream of someone you want to dream with. That's what happens in the tyranny. That's what happens when you're a slave

and that's not to be recommended. So develop your own dream. What advice do you have for introducing God and faith to your kids without being pushy as someone who's also tried to find their faith? Well, certainly an example is useful. Practice is useful. You know, we didn't bring our kids to church.

And that was a mistake. Part of the reason that was a mistake is because they weren't exposed to the stories. You need to know the stories. you probably also have to act out communally your dedication to the communal sacrifice and that's what you do when you set aside an hour a week to attend church when I was stopped going to church when I was 13 I justified that on the basis of the hypocrisy of the churchgoers who were in my thoroughly informed opinion sinners always week except for the hour they spent in church. I didn't understand at that time that was

better than being sinners all the time without an hour spent ever looking upward. Right. So I would say, find a church and attend with your kids and expose your kids to the stories. And if the church isn't everything that you think it might be, then perhaps you should adjust your expectations, because who are you to judge? And maybe you have some judgment to make, but also maybe the fact that the church is out of order is something you should address, right? And that part of attending is actually bolstering the institution

that you participate in so that it pursues its aim with more accuracy. And we can abandon our traditional structures and our rituals, and we can do that because we think they're imperfect, but that leaves us with what we have now and the catastrophic mess of confused ritual that inevitably floods in to replace the flawed institutions of our tradition. Enact the rituals, learn the music,

expose your kids to the artistic tradition, tell them the stories, teach them to be literate, and act out the morality that bolsters and fortifies your marriage and makes it deeper with your children present. And that's what you have to offer them. You know, here's an interesting thing too. So I don't know how much you guys know about this,

but as the sexual revolution has progressed, and every form of sexual gratification imaginable is at hand in the realm of pornography and celebrated in every form in the popular culture. The actual amount of sex that people are having is declining precipitously, such that in Japan, for example, 30% of people under 30 are virgins. You know who has the most sex? Religious married people. Right.

Well, so isn't that remarkable, right? I mean, who the hell would have ever guessed that? Because the popular parlance was that more fundamentalist proclivity was associated with like a finger-wagging sexual fear, right, and a stricture. But the reality turned out to be the case that even in the sexual domain, the pathway of maximal engagement on the sexual front turns out to be the disciplined religious pathway that constitutes a long-term heterosexual. sexual, religious founded marriage. And so that's another thing you have to offer your kids, you know, in the face of the blandishment of the idiot hedonists. It's like, no, kid, if you want to be satisfied, it's like have a real relationship, right?

And that is the human pathway forward. We know as well, just so you know, we know as well that people who prefer short-term mating strategies, that's how they're described in the psychological literature, and that's the one-night stand crowd. What are their associated personality characteristics? It's a marker for the early onset of criminality. The more criminal kids have sex with more partners younger. That's been known for like 40 years.

But at the pure personality level, the short-term hedonistic maters are psychopathic, so that makes them predatory parasites, Machiavellian, so they're manipulative, narcissistic, so they want unearned admiration, and to top it all off, and that was only discovered probably in the last four years, sadistic, which means they take delight in the pain of others. And that's pure empirical investigation, by the way,

done by people who essentially lean left, who didn't expect that finding. And so by offering your children the traditional religious pathway forward and emphasizing the foundation, even of the sexual, in the committed relationships that are founded and sacrized by the religious, not only do you protect them and discipline them in a manner that will make them maximally productive and generous, but you offer them the best pathway to the deepest pleasures

that could possibly inform their lives. Right, right. Well, it's always good to end with the celebration of sex. So, all right, everybody. Thank you very much for coming tonight and much appreciated. Thanks, Tim. You're back. Thank you, everyone.

It's good to see you all. This episode is brought to you by Alloy Health. A widening part, a ponytail that suddenly feels smaller, more hair in your brush, and somehow an entire wig in the shower drain. Hair changes can feel deeply personal. Almost 40% of women experience hair. loss during menopause and hormones may be driving it. Alloy offers prescription solutions for the scalp, lashes, and brows all through menopause specialized doctors. Its oral treatments can address female

hair loss while its lash and brow serum is clinically proven to produce fuller, longer lashes and thicker, darker brows in as little as eight weeks. Everything starts online and your prescription is delivered directly to your door. With Alloy, your best hair isn't behind you. Visit myalloy.com and use the code daily wire to get 20% off your first order. Your menopause specialized doctor will tailor your care to your needs. Plus, you get zero dollar unlimited messaging with your doctor. Head to m-y-all-l-o-y-com and use code daily wire to get 20% off your first. This code is valid on products only. Get some more on this in a moment. First, if you own a small business, that's off to you because not only are you providing jobs for your community,

you've bootstrapped your way to success despite insane taxes and crazy regulations and all the other things that get thrown at you. I choose to endorse Peartock because they understand that. They started as a small business that scrappiness and value for hard work and helping their neighbor continue to drive them forward. It's why their customer service team is right here in the United States. It's also why they want to give other small businesses, the HVAC companies, roofers, landscapers, the best wireless service at the lowest price possible. So if you own a business, if you want to save on wireless, if you want excellent customer service, as goodness knows, that's hard to get nowadays.

switch your team to Pure Talk for as little as $15 a line for talk, text, and data. Head on over to Pure Talkbusiness.com slash Shapiro. See how much PureTalk could save your business. Plus, get 50% off your very first month of coverage. Your business deserves awesome customer service and fair pricing. Pure Talkbusiness.com slash Shapiro. Again, I've been using Pure Talk for years. Best coverage, best price.

Don't spend extra money where you don't have to. Pure Talkbusiness.com slash Shapiro. And get 50% off your very first month of coverage, PureTalkbusiness.com slash Shapiro. Everybody has that list. the things you know you should get around to eventually, organizing the garage, updating important documents, taking care of long-term financial planning. Life insurance tends to live on that list for a lot of people, not because it isn't important, because people assume it's going to be complicated. That's why PolicyGenius exists. PolicyGenius is an online insurance marketplace that helps

you compare life insurance quotes from top insurers in one place for free. Their license The license team helps explain your options clearly, compare coverage amounts and prices, answer questions, and help you find a policy that fits your needs. No guesswork, no confusion, just clarity. And while they're helping with the shopping, you can get back to enjoying summer with the people who matter most. PolicyGenius has helped thousands of families find the right coverage and has earned thousands of five-star reviews in the process, because some items on the to-do list are worth checking

off. With PolicyGenius, you can see if you can find 20-year life insurance policies starting at just $276 a year for $1 million in coverage. Head to PolicyGenius.com to compare life insurance quotes from top companies and see how much you could save. That's policygenius.com.