PBD Podcast | EP 146 | American Author David Berlinski
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PBD Podcast Episode 146. Patrick Bet-David is joined by Author David Berlinski.
Check out David's work online: https://bit.ly/3jyNAOQ
Buy David's latest book, Human Nature: https://amzn.to/37M5DP4
Buy David's hit book, The Devil's Delusion: https://bit.ly/3vjlYme
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About:
David Berlinski is an American author who has written books about mathematics and the history of science as well as fiction. An opponent of evolution, he is a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, an organization dedicated to promulgating the science of intelligent design.
About Co-Host:
Adam “Sos” Sosnick has lived a true rags to riches story. He hasn’t always been an authority on money. Connect with him on his weekly SOSCAST here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLw4s_zB_R7I0VW88nOW4PJkyREjT7rJic
Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Your Next Five Moves (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
To reach the Valuetainment team you can email: booking@valuetainment.com
0:00 - Start
9:07 - How David Berlinski Formed His Thoughts Against Darwins Theory Of Evolution
20:32 -What David Berlinski Stands for
25:05 - The Problem with Taking A Position In The Middle
29:14 - David Berlinski Explains Who 'God' Is
36:40 - David Berlinski explains Pascal's Wager
42:11 - David Berlinski's Heaviest Thoughts At 80 Years Old
49:19 - David Berlinski explains how the holocaust affected his views on religion
55:12 - David Berlinski explains the purpose of a man
1:02:26 - The most common thing David Berlinski hears from people who read his work
1:04:21 - David Berlinski explains what we can learn from the 60's generation
1:19:00 - University professors today vs 1960
1:23:28 - David Berlinski explains which institution we trust too much
1:27:17 - David Berlinski explains how evolution can coincide with religion
1:32:56 - Callers
1:41:33 - David Berlinski explains the role of religion throughout history
Episode number 146 with the legendary David Berlinski.
If you don't know our guest today, let me give him a proper introduction.
I give him a different one off camera.
I'm going to give that as well, just so you know, I made that commitment to you.
I'm going to do it.
Okay, senior fellow of the Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture, the hub of intelligent design movement.
I want to say he got his PhD in philosophy from Princeton and also was a fellow in mathematics and molecular biology at Columbia University, but he doesn't stop there.
He's taught philosophy, mathematics, English at Stanford, Rutgers, the city of New University of New York, University of Washington, University of Puget Sound, San Jose State University, the University of Santa Clara, University of San Francisco, San Francisco State University, mathematics at University de Paris.
And he flew in from Paris, which the flight was uneventful.
And here's what I told you off camera.
And I want to say to everybody as well.
You come across as the man that you've debated Hitchens.
You've shared a stage with some of the best debaters, Hitchens being on the atheist side.
You went up there on the agnostic side.
You've gone against Darwinism.
You've gone against, I don't know, Sam Harris.
You have a lot of different opinions, but you're sarcastic.
You have a sense of humor.
You know how to poke.
You know how to get under people's skins.
And you're very, very smart.
With that being said, David, thank you so much for traveling.
Come and visiting us here in Florida.
You're so very welcome.
It's a pleasure being here.
Yes, and it's a pleasure having you.
And I love that tie you got.
Yeah, I was going to say, well dressed as well.
I mean, above all, sharp.
I point you intellectual life in terms of the opportunity it affords me to display my wardrobe.
That's what it is.
I like that.
So you really only came to show off your clothes.
The only conversation.
The only reason.
Let's just do a fashion show right now.
Can you imagine?
So, hey, why did you go on that guy's podcast?
Listen, I wanted to show the new tiny suit I got.
We spent five minutes talking about his shoes before the podcast.
There's no reason to stop that conversation.
You know what?
Forget about God.
Forget about evolution.
Forget about Darwinism.
Let's turn this into a fashion.
I told him, listen, you would be, what would you call yourself?
A confused Jew?
Why would you put yourself out there?
Yeah, I'll take that.
You know, Christian, what would you put yourself?
Confused Catholic.
Confused Catholic.
And then we have a agnostic over here.
And what would you consider yourself, Tyler?
Confused Jew, I think.
Tyler is not Jewish whatsoever, but he's talking about converting, but he's confused.
Regardless, I told, here's the expectation.
I don't like to start podcasts with a very high expectation where we're going to be disappointing ourselves.
Today, we're going to start off with a very low expectation.
The goal is by the time we are done, we know for a fact who God is.
That's what the goal is.
It's not a high expectation.
And we got somebody like you that can help us with that.
Obviously, the weekend's been very eventful.
I was in, we have another podcast this week.
Friday, I went to Joe Rogue and watched him perform in Jacksonville, which was hilarious.
And I saw Tony.
Tony Hinchcliffe.
Oh, my God.
I thought you just went to a UFC.
You actually saw the channel.
I was with Joe.
He got me tickets and I want to watch them perform.
I had no idea this guy was this funny.
Joe, 12,000 people in the room, he's performing in the middle in the back.
A full-on fight breaks out.
20 people rumble.
It's hilarious.
Everyone's looking at it.
They're screaming.
Joe's like, what the hell is going on back there?
They put the light in that section, and you literally see like, you know, guys punching another guy.
They all stop and sit down because they didn't want to get arrested.
Cops ran up there.
It was awesome.
The next day we went to the fight.
We had dinner two nights together with Joe and Tony and Hans and, you know, all the guys.
Just a bunch of man's man.
Freaking awesome conversations.
A lot of good things coming soon.
The restaurant we went to is Cal Ford Steakhouse.
The owner sent me a message saying, I've been watching your content for the longest time.
The most ridiculous steakhouse in Jacksonville.
Bone marrow, faux gras, wagu beef.
They brought everything.
The dessert was ridiculous.
We had a good time.
I'll fill in on a major project that we may be launching here soon that's going to be very funny.
And it's going to be for men.
Stick around.
We'll be announcing it probably in the next, I don't know, maybe tomorrow, if not, definitely next week.
And it's going to be fun.
And you went from Rogan to the house that Brady built.
Oh, we rented out Mr. Berlinski.
Yeah, we rented out the entire Foxborough stadium.
And we brought two Patriots.
One was Matt Light, who's hilarious.
He was the offensive line, the center for Brady.
He was telling story.
He won three Super Bowls himself, and he's in the New England Patriots Hall of Fame.
And then we had Rob Ninkovich.
Ninkovich, which is linebacker, peace number 50.
Absolutely.
Both of them went to Purdue.
Then Tom's agent was their manager, was financial, the guy who's been managing his finances for the last 17 years.
He was there.
We sat down and watched Man in the Arena for two days.
It was a great session.
We had a great time.
But today is about you.
So, for some that don't know, if you don't mind taking a minute and give your background on how you got started, why mathematics, how you came to your conclusion with your philosophy.
Try to do that in a shorter version, and then we'll go into questions and different topics.
Sure.
Essential aspects.
Born 1942, New York, mid-Manhattan.
And no matter how many different places I live, I'll always be a New Yorker.
That's ineradicable.
I went through public schools in New York, went to Bronx Science, then I went to Columbia, then I went to Princeton for a PhD.
After that, I went out to Stanford as an assistant professor.
And thereafter, I decided I had a higher calling than an academic life.
And so I did a lot of different things.
I worked for McKinsey for a year.
I worked for the city of New York.
God only knows how I got a job as a senior budgetary analyst.
They gave me $2 billion and said, spend it carefully on the welfare of the city of New York.
$2 billion.
What year is this?
What year is it?
This was 1970 or 71.
That's a lot of money.
$2 billion?
Oh, yeah.
It went so fast.
You have to know how to tell it this.
Perhaps the worst decision of the Lindsey administration to put that kind of money in my hands.
I had no idea what to do with it except to spend it as rapidly as possible.
And then I bounced around in a lot of different academic positions, spent some time at Columbia, taught for a while at Rutgers, moved out to California, lived in San Francisco, taught up and down Silicon Valley and various colleges, switched from teaching philosophy and logic to teaching mathematics.
I love teaching mathematics, especially the calculus sequence.
And then around 1992, I figured that I'm going to live just by writing.
And that's what pretty much I've been doing ever since.
99, I left the United States, moved to France.
And I've been in Paris for the last 25 years, very happily ensconced right next to Notre Dame.
So I'm the beneficiary of a lot of wisdom coming from the cathedral.
And if it's worth your while to answer your own questions, I'm prepared to discuss the issue.
So why Paris?
Why'd you want to live there?
Why have you been there for 25 years?
Because the United States was a little too small for me and my ex-wives.
How many ex-wives was that?
Sufficiently many.
Okay.
Sufficiently many.
Right.
That was the first question they asked me.
You know, there's a kind of immigration authorities that when you want to settle in France, the first question is, why are you coming to France?
And that was my response.
And they said, that's a perfect answer.
We've come to the right place.
Because that's normal.
Encompron.
En ce compron.
And I love France even more after that.
Why'd you stay there?
No one America's been having the problems it's been having lately.
You didn't want to come back here and start helping us solve some of these problems instead of staying on the street.
That sounds morally far too grand for me.
I stayed there because at a certain age.
How selfish of you, man.
We needed you the last two years.
Yeah, I understand that, and I feel badly about it.
But you reach a certain age.
You just don't want to move around anymore.
I hardly like to leave my apartment.
Speaking of your ex-wives, Playboy, there's a little bio over here.
And can I read a line for you and maybe set you up for the next question?
This is about the ⁇ you're a critic of the theory of evolution.
And it says, Berlinski is a senior fellow of Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture, which is a Seattle-based think take as the hub of the intelligent design movement.
And Berlinski shares the movement's disbelief in the evidence for evolution, but does not openly avow intelligent design and describes his relationship with the idea as warm but distant.
It's the same attitude that I display publicly towards my ex-wives.
That publicly wasn't my word.
Okay.
Well, everything else?
Was that accurate?
Yeah, sort of.
Okay.
Sort of.
Would you unpack that for us?
Well, look, I have a world of admiration for the guys at the Discovery Institute because they've done a remarkable job in bringing to the forefront of biological consciousness some of the deep problems with Darwinian evolution.
Some of the deep problems in biology itself.
It's not just the theory of evolution.
There's a great deal.
It's mysterious, not well understood, imponderable, not accessible to theory yet.
And there's some terrifically smart people who have essentially made the case that this is a theory which is in many ways, not in every way, but in many ways, not what it's cracked up to be.
And I share that sentiment.
I wrote a piece way before I joined the Discovery Institute.
I wrote a piece for Commentary, which is a magazine out of New York, making exactly the deniable Darwin, it was called.
And ever since, I've been puttering like a small motorboat making related ancillary criticisms.
It's not at the forefront of my attention right now.
I mean, you can only spend so much time criticizing Darwinian evolution.
But it's an important issue.
And I think those guys deserve a world of credit for their critical stance because it hasn't been easy.
I mean, the entire biological establishment is joined in a spasm of repugnance when intelligent design is prominently mentioned.
Undeserved repugnance, but repugnance anyway.
The distance that you mentioned is my failure wholeheartedly to embrace the theory of intelligent design.
I can't get over there.
I can't get over there when the goalpost is Darwinian evolution.
I can't get over there when the goalpost is intelligent design.
That may be my limitation.
It may be just a streak of contrariness.
I don't know.
But I am not an advocate of intelligent design.
I've never advocated intelligent design, but I'm deeply sympathetic with it.
That's quite a different matter.
To be an advocate and to be sympathetic.
I'm sympathetic with a lot of things I don't advocate for.
If you could.
I don't know if it's possible to do it linearly, but if on one side of the equation is the theory of evolution, right, we came from.
For what theory?
Okay, so evolution.
I don't want to debate a scientist here, but on one side of the linear side of things is we came from monkeys or primates or salamanders and fish, all that, and all that.
And then on the complete opposite side of the spectrum is creationism.
And I don't know if creationism is different from intelligent design, or if you can just kind of paint a picture linearly of where things are in the scientific world and maybe where you are in this, and that could kind of open up maybe a further conversation.
I rest inscrutably at the middle, affirming neither the left nor the right, but choosing a studied indifference to both.
I think that there's a very legitimate case to be made for serious theological affirmations.
Not a case I'm prepared to make, but it's a serious case.
I mean, it's been a serious case for the last 5,000 years.
We're called it history.
Every culture develops a theology, and with theology, a certain kind of mythology, and with the mythology, very often, an elaborate philosophical apparatus.
After all, the Catholic faith is not intellectually insignificant.
It's a huge body of doctrine and dogma.
Jewish religion has an incredibly exciting, deeply penetrating body of Talmudic interpretation.
And I'm sure that the same thing is true of Islam.
I know much less about Islam than I do about other religions, but I'm sure exactly the same thing is true that the Quran has been the subject of intense meditation and speculation.
I find myself in the somewhat embarrassing position of being very sympathetic to all of those theological aspirations, but in my own life being unable wholeheartedly to participate in them.
As I say in one of my books, I forgot where.
I'm a secular Jew and I've lived my life as a secular Jew.
The Jewishness is inevitable.
I was born a Jew.
But the choice of a secular world, the choice of secular ambitions, that's not inevitable.
I mean, many people renounce a secular life.
But I am in the middle of a secular environment.
I wholeheartedly participate in all the moral divigations and the uncertainties of secular life.
I embrace secular life, and I'm not about to renounce any of it.
At what point did you come to this conclusion?
Which conclusion?
The fact that you're neutral, you're staying in the middle.
I'm an agnostic.
I'm sympathetic for those that, you know, you believe there is a God, and those on the other side, evolution, you know, I'm kind of staying here.
At what point did you come to that conclusion?
You know, when I was at Princeton doing graduate work.
So very early.
Yeah, 1964, 1965.
I was roommates with another, a very good philosopher, Daniel Messinger was his name.
And we had never heard about Darwin's theory.
I mean, all through Columbia College, all through our graduate education at Princeton, the theory of evolution simply didn't figure on our particular intellectual radar.
And one day I said to Daniel, you know, maybe we should read that book.
And so we both read the book, Darwin's The Origin of Species, and we both came away saying, you know, this thing makes no sense.
This is just gibberish.
Which part of it?
We were only 22 at the time.
Please bear that in mind.
We had no right to say that.
But it is interesting, and I'm talking now from a psychological perspective, my own, that I can very definitely point to that experience.
Two people reading the foundational text of the theory of evolution and both of us coming away saying this.
This just doesn't have the ring of truth to it.
Of course, it was completely unmotivated.
We had no justification for saying it.
I'm reporting an intuitive experience because you asked me, can I give you a date?
Yeah 1964, Princeton.
That's when I I felt that that particular double set of Animed versions and you and you never went through the process of, like you know how Martin Luther went through a phase of, you know, fighting and arguing his own argument and going back and forth.
You never said uh, you know, maybe i'm wrong, maybe I gotta go do a little bit more digging to go the other side.
So, and maybe you did, did you, from 22, ever all of a sudden like, lean a little bit more towards?
Maybe there is a god?
I think there is a god.
I'm just trying to see who god is.
Is it Jesus?
Is it this?
Is it that?
Is it?
Which one is?
No no no no, I don't think.
No no, I just read this three books here.
No, it's not.
And you know, i'm kind of, oh my god, maybe these guys are making sense to me.
I'm listening to more these guys were you?
Was it like a pendulum going back and forth where you're going through, or you just stayed right in your lane, pendulum going back and forth?
I mean, I think the graviment of your question is uh, did I, did I suffer um, the experience of asking myself with a certain amount of intensity, maybe i'm wrong?
Yeah no, I can't recall ever saying that to myself.
Why, though?
Why because I felt, why that level of certainty?
No, it's not a level of uncertainty, it seems it's not a level of certainty, it's not a level of uncertainty, it's a level of indifference, and and I have to be as candid as as it's possible to be um, look at my age.
These questions have a, a somber significance.
They lacked when I was 22 22, I could say, you know, it doesn't matter what I can do, I can make up for it later.
Well, the shadows are getting longer and longer obviously um, but I still find myself emotionally indifferent, although attracted to, but emotionally indifferent to, an intense religious life.
Perhaps it's fear, perhaps it's just uh temperamental, I don't know, and there's a lot to be afraid of when you commit yourself to a religious life, like judgment, i'm certainly not eager to be judged.
Nobody is now Pat.
When you ask him that question, I assume that's something that you had done on your own you've been pretty vocal about.
You were an atheist at one point and now you, I mean you literally wear a cross.
You you've kind of gone through this.
What's your uh, you know no, what's your pendulum?
When Armond and I were going through you know, he's like hey, i'm like dude, i'm an, i'm an.
I don't believe in god, i'm an atheist.
The life i've lived, I don't believe in god.
This is when you were.
This is i'm 23 years old, I just got out of the army.
It's like nothing's going my way.
I'm like dude, just leave me alone, i'm not gonna go to this religion stuff.
Some people need god, I don't need god.
And I would go to different bible studies and they were all boring to me because they're all telling the same exact thing.
Then I went to a bible study that was three mathematicians.
One of them was a professor teaching math in Pasadena.
The other one was a pastor who was all about math.
And I related that because to me, math you're.
The great thing about math is you solve for X. What's X?
And then you kind of work backwards and you're getting to an answer, right?
And that kind of becomes the premise of your life.
Business is solved for X. You want to raise $10 million.
You want to do this much top-line revenue.
How many employees do you need?
What technology do you need?
How much do we need to raise today?
What do we need to do with this?
And then you kind of solve with that number.
You want to sell the business.
Everything is about solved for X. Engineering.
Exactly.
And as somebody that is at his level and with his level of humor, because you need that, which you don't take yourself seriously, that allows you to be able to entertain more ideas.
If you take yourself way too seriously, you're not going to get to the truth because you protect your ego.
So his combination is the right ideal person to want to seek it because he's not trying to be right.
He's trying to figure out.
I don't know if you understand what I'm saying.
He's not grounded in his beliefs.
No, he's not willing to come.
You want some of these guys that are debating.
They're not debating for the truth.
They're debating to prove you wrong.
And they're great debaters.
Then there's those that you listen to, you're like, damn, this guy is, I just believe this guy.
I mean, he's, I don't feel the ego.
I get the feeling with you.
So you're the kind of guy I like to listen to because you come across as somebody that you, you know, you don't have a, you're not trying to prove your arguments.
Believe me, I'm 100% right.
This is what's going on.
That's not you.
That's not your project.
That's why I said, did he ever go through the battle of pendulum saying, man, this guy made a great argument.
I read this book by this guy.
Did it ever flip?
But apparently it did not.
Or is there something that we're missing that you, something that you 100% wholeheartedly believe?
If there's something that the audience can kind of grasp and be like, all right, this is what this guy stands for, other than, hey, I don't know what I don't know.
Is there something that you totally affirm and stand by religiously?
Sure.
What is that?
I'm not going to say.
What do you mean you're not going to say?
Why should I confide the innermost secrets of my heart to assholes?
That's why we have you on here today.
Are you serious with that?
Everyone has something.
Everyone has something locked away about which he has a certain emotional attitude.
But it's of very, very little interest to anyone else.
Is the question, is there anything about which I'm certain?
The answer is sure.
That's what I want to know.
For example, I'm certain that mathematics, to the extent that it's demonstrable, is true.
I think there are certain very sophisticated questions you can ask about truth and proof and mathematics, but those are not the questions that I'm asking.
I think the body of mathematical knowledge accumulated early part of the 21st century is the richest body of human knowledge ever accumulated, followed very closely by the body of knowledge encapsulated in theoretical physics.
I'm really certain those are achievements.
Much less certain about lots of other things.
Certain about the existence, as every man is certain about the existence of certain attitudes, validities, commitments, which make no sense to anyone else.
But in answer to your original question, my indifference had a lot to do with watching the experience of my parents.
A lot to do.
Both my parents grew up in Germany, Imperial Germany, and then Weimar Germany.
And they both always said they were children of the Weimar Republic.
They began music lessons at the age of six and both became professional musicians.
My father was a concert pianist in Central Europe.
My mother was an excellent pianist.
And they both reported to me very early in my childhood their defiance of Jewish orthodoxy, how they both told the rabbi, oh, they just didn't believe in God, not the God of the Jewish tradition at any rate.
The God they preferred to embrace was the God of art, especially music.
And they were heirs to the entire rich, complex tradition of German musical experience.
And they enriched that tradition when they moved to France and they learned about the French musical tradition.
And the question that always influenced me in my childhood was watching this commitment and asking myself, is this an adequate substitute for a classic theological understanding of the universe?
Could some, and it's by no means restricted to my parents, I think everyone from that milieu, intellectuals, writers, artists, musicians, attempted from 1910 to 1940 or so to find a substitute God, a substitute experience which would have the same compelling moral and intellectual force as a classical religious experience.
Toward the end of my life, end of my parents' lives, it occurred to me, end of my life as well, last stages, that that experiment was a failure.
That the God in which they had invested so much emotional and artistic energy was not really a substitute at all.
And that was a sobering experience.
That I realized, in the end, music failed them both.
It didn't provide what they really needed.
And I think that's a very common experience when you turn to deep, powerful currents and you try to identify them the way many contemporary intellectuals do when they talk about humanism, for example, as substitutes for discarded tradition.
The discovery, I suspect, is almost inevitable that the substitute is pretty much like a sugar substitute.
It may taste sweet, but it leaves a very bitter aftertaste.
You know, one of our users just gave a super chat, and he kind of said what I was going to ask you, but he gave scripture behind it, which is kind of interesting.
I'd love to know what this user's name is, by the way, because every time I say COVID12X12, if you can let us know who you are so I can call you by your first name or whatever name you'd like to be called, I want to give you that credit.
He says, taking a position in the middle is interesting.
The Bible mentions, because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I am going to vomit you out of my mouth.
Middle is safe, hot or cold is risky.
So the way I would say to someone like you is, for someone, do you think the position you took at this stage of your life, you can tell me, Pat, you have no clue what you're talking about.
I screw you.
I'm very happy where I'm at, and I'm totally okay with that.
Do you think you took a safe position from 22 till today, the last 58 years?
Or do you think you could have gone a little bit deeper to really make the argument stronger amongst different denominations and evolution?
Or no, you're very satisfied with the position you took?
Very satisfied.
I mean, surely.
You know what I'm asking?
Well, from a rhetorical point of view, I would never affirm.
I'm very satisfied that that is too vulgar a position, even for me.
No, I'm not very satisfied.
I'm not satisfied at all.
But at the same time, I am not motivated.
I don't have that urgency of desire which would lead me to a full-fledged religious commitment.
I don't have that urgency or desire.
Is that what you said?
Urgency of desire.
Of desire.
You never had it or you don't have it current.
I don't think I ever had it.
Look, mathematical talent is fairly rare.
I mean, you look at the bell curve.
The really, really talented people are all the way off on the right.
The number of people who are genuinely motivated by a religious instinct, I think, is about as rare.
It's a fully consuming commitment.
I don't disagree.
I don't disagree.
It's a fully consuming commitment.
You cannot say, I'm leading a religious life and lead the life of a scoundrel.
It's very difficult.
I mean, you can lead the life of a scoundrel and expect or at least hope for divine forgiveness, but it's not a particularly salutary combination.
I think in all the areas, talent and mathematics, talent and art, talent and music, talent and religious experience, the number of people who are seriously committed all the way off on the right-hand side of the bell curve.
If you go back to the 12th, 13th, and 14th century, the number of people who embraced a true monastic life is about the same as the number of people who embraced that life in the 20th century.
Small percentage of the population.
It's a great mistake to talk about the Christian Middle Ages as if virtually everyone was deeply involved.
I mean, it was a reigning ideology, that's for sure.
Well, you know what it's like the way you said it made sense.
Like being seven feet tall and having zero interest in basketball.
You're like, listen, I'm not interested in basketball.
I want to do, you know, completely different game.
I want to play tennis.
I don't want to play basketball.
So you know.
I didn't mean to say I don't want to.
I think it's I certainly would acknowledge certain desires, certain wants, which are unfulfillable.
For example, I would dearly love to be a great, great mathematician, inscribed in all the history books, having produced a thunderously magnificent set of demonstrations.
It's not going to happen, no matter how much I want it to happen.
I think in terms of religious experience, there is certainly some desire there for a committed religious experience, but it's not going to happen either, because I can't act on it.
David, the basic question, I just curious to know how you answer this question.
Who is God?
When somebody says, so, David, who is God?
What do you say?
Well, there are a lot of different answers.
You can certainly waffle your head off about a question like that.
You can talk about a Plotinus-like access to ever more refined layers of reality, a God followed by successive superior gods, that sort of thing.
I think we're pretty limited.
We're limited to a particular tradition, which is the Judeo-Christian tradition.
That's where the resonance exists.
We understand that tradition best.
I know the Hindu tradition has a completely different conception of God.
The Buddhist tradition has a different conception of God.
But I can't talk to those because all I know from those traditions I know is a matter of scholarship, not intimacy.
The Judeo-Christian God is outside time and space, outside the physical universe.
It's not one of those things we encounter within the universe.
It has certain attributes, certain powers which we assign to it.
This is theology.
It's not a matter of a physical science.
We're not discovering this.
And there are two or at least three additional doctrines associated with the question that you just asked.
One is the very old idea that within human beings there's a kind of image of God.
That is, there is a synchronous appreciation, God for human beings, human beings for God, which is manifested in art by the assumption that a human being somehow reflects the divine.
The second assumption is that the surest path to intimacy with the deity lies within.
And that's certainly what the Buddhists say as well.
That is, what is within gives you the surest, most accessible way to reach the divinity.
And the third is a series of pronouncements about human nature that are part of Western theology.
For example, the Christian doctrine of fallen human nature, which suggests, to get back to your question, that when we talk about God, I'm talking about people in our position.
We talk about God, we're talking about a theoretical entity, and it's just theoretical because we have no hands-on experience.
It's beyond experimental science, who has an intense personal interest in moral judgment.
And that's an aspect which I think is severely neglected.
When we talk about God, we're not talking about someone who fulfills a certain role in explaining how the universe came about.
Well, he created the whole thing.
Okay, we know that.
We know that.
That's a traditional assumption.
But a less traditional assumption, especially in the 21st century, it's not only a creating God, it's not only a God with enormous powers, embarrassingly large powers.
It's not only an infinite God, but it is a God, and this is the crucial point, it's a God who has a peculiar interest in our moral nature and who is prepared, for example, to judge us.
That's part of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
The judging aspect, and it has been the foundational stone for virtually every system of Judeo-Christian morality since at least the 5th century BC.
Very much neglected, because the question is wide open.
When you take that foundational stone away, you just yank it away, and you eliminate the idea of the universal system of judgment, judging human beings for their acts during their life.
What's the result?
What happens to society when you take that foundational stone away?
This has been a question that I think has been pertinent since at least 1820, 1830, when the great movement of secular liberation from Christian doctrine began to accelerate and spread to every corner of every corner of Europe and the United States.
We're talking about a 200-year-old process.
Secularism is not just the last 10 years.
It's a long, complicated tradition.
And we are living in a secular society.
It's absolutely obvious.
We're not living in a society where people are consumed by the thought of judgment or that they're proposing in any way to put inhibitions or restraints on their desires or to conform in any way to whatever the code of conduct may have been enforced in the 18th and 17th and 16th century, who are in fact proposing to make it up as they go along, which I'm afraid we're all doing.
But when you remove that judgment, you were making a point about what happens when you remove that judgment.
What happens?
Well, it's like asking, what happens in a physical system?
You withdraw the energy from it.
I mean, the physical system can look just the way it did before.
But there's nothing doing any work anymore.
Let's just say it's a piston with no external source of energy driving the piston.
Well, I cannot say, look, it's perfectly obvious what happens.
But I can say, if you want to know what happens, there is a correlation between the rise of secularism and the nature of society.
Look around.
Look around.
Are people restraining their behavior?
Are they inhibited?
A traditional series of codicils being enforced throughout?
The answer seems to be no.
Secularism seems to allow a great many things that previously were forbidden.
Does that just come down to accountability?
Is judgment accountability?
I mean, something that Pat always talks about is accountability.
Like, who's holding the politicians accountable?
Well, you know, the voters, but that's a whole nother question.
But judgment at the end of the day comes down to accountability.
Are you going to be accountable for your actions, good or bad?
Is that essentially the...
That's a good question.
I think it's very similar to the question I was raising.
I mean, Hobbes said the fear of death is the source of law.
The fear of violent death is the source of conscience.
It's the source of conscience because violent death, you meet death without any preparation, any theological preparations, and you're going to be judged instantaneously.
It's a very pregnant remark by Hobbes.
But I think that accountability is another way of saying, look, we're now living in a society where the essential force behind judgment, the thing that made it live, that's been progressively withdrawn.
There's no point in denying it, it seems to me.
No point in saying, well, we've recreated a moral universe in every way comparable to the moral universe that we have denied or derided.
Are you a gambler?
Are you a gambling man?
No.
Do you like gambling on horses or, you know, like sports or any of that?
No.
You don't play cars.
You don't play dice.
You don't play crabs.
You don't play any of that?
No, really?
You're missing out, man.
No, the reason why I was going to ask you, well, would you say, are you the kind of guy that when you were 25 years old at a bar, you saw a hot girl?
Did you overthink it in your mind and say, you know, I don't know if I want to go talk to her because what if she says no?
Or were you kind of like, I'm just going to go talk to her?
You took the risk and you spoke to her.
Neither.
Neither.
You just sat there and she came to you.
That's right.
We're not part of that elite.
So you had life easy.
So even before Tinder, you were Tinder.
So they were swiping you right.
Was what?
You were Tinder.
Do you know what Tinder is?
Believe me, they made it after you.
Tinder is like a dating site in America.
It's a dating app.
Yeah, yeah, it's a dating app that guys use to swipe right to get their foot.
But going back, I don't think you needed it, though.
But going back to you, your personality is not at all risky.
Are you like the guy that, hey, let's go jump off that cliff?
You're like, I don't want to jump off that cliff.
Of course it's risky.
I should be risky.
Which risks am I prepared to take?
Well, then you know.
Well, no, okay.
So then, no, because to me, marriage is risky.
Having kids is risky.
Going into business is risky.
Moving to Paris is risky.
Moving to a different state.
Life is risky, right?
Taking a position with faith is risky.
Deciding to do almost anything today is risky, right?
So look, I understand the position of assuming formlessness, which means never like, hey, you guys, I understand your position.
I disagree with this, but I understand this position, but I disagree with this.
And I kind of stay here.
That's a safe, not risky position, but you also don't create enemies.
So you kind of stay in a place where enemies are not being created.
Oh, you'd be surprised.
How are you making enemies?
So who are your enemies?
I don't see people dislike.
Even when your debate with Hitchens, Hitchens was very respectful, and it wasn't as typical.
He was more vicious towards his brother than he was to you.
You guys had a very nice debate.
We had an extremely pleasant debate, but don't forget he was terribly ill at the time.
I don't think he had the energy or the vigor really to do a full court press.
I don't think so.
It was a one-hour.
It wasn't a three-hour.
It was a one-hour debate.
Isn't that kind of like not the point of the debate to have a nice, pleasant debate?
It depends whether you're dealing with a man at the brink of death or not.
A lot depends on that.
I mean, if he had been indisposed with a headache, that would have been one thing, but he was dying of cancer.
And that changed all the parameters.
At least it did for me.
I was in absolutely no mood to attack him.
Got it.
Pat, you're asking about risk for a reason.
Yeah, I want to go to that.
I wanted to elaborate on that.
I wanted to unpack that the question of you come across as a guy that would be the risky guy.
You've taken bigger risks in your life.
At this phase of your life at 80, do you sit there and say, well, like inside when you're by yourself, nobody's around.
You're sitting at a coffee shop in Paris, you're having your nice croissant, and the same waitress is coming to you and you're speaking to her and you're reading the paper or whatever book you would be reading and you're saying, okay, David, we kind of got a risk and take one of them.
What do we want to do?
Is it going to be Jew?
Is it going to be Christian?
Is it going to be LDS?
Are we going Catholic?
Are we going to go Muslim?
Let's take it.
Let's pick one of them.
I got a 20% chance.
No.
You know, I'm going to go Baha'i because Baha'i welcomes all the religions.
You don't think about like...
It's a little like Pascal's Wager, isn't it?
I mean, that's the question you really need to me.
I accept Pascal's wager.
What is Pascal's wager?
Pascal, in the 17th century, had a wonderful theological argument about commitment, commitment to God, belief in God.
He said, look, what do you lose?
What do you lose?
If you commit yourself to God and you live a God-fearing life and God exists, well, that's a terrific benefit.
You've come out ahead of the game.
And if he doesn't exist, what have you lost?
You've lost nothing.
In game theory, that's called a dominant strategy.
No matter what, it's better to believe in God.
If you don't believe in God and he exists, you're in for an awfully hard time.
And if you don't believe in God and he doesn't exist, well, nothing changes.
So why is that a bad approach?
I don't think it's a bad approach at all.
I think it's an excellent approach.
And everyone I've talked to, when I translate that argument into practical terms, agree, yes, I accept Pascal's wager.
He was right.
And he was right.
That doesn't mean that the argument.
But you're saying he's right.
But you're not willing to accept Pascal's wager.
Yeah, but that's the limitation of an argument.
You know, there are many arguments I can consider where the premises are true, the conclusion follows logically, but it doesn't mean anything to me.
You'd be a very hard person to put on the trial.
I hate to use this angle on what I'm saying.
I can see at 20 taking that position.
I can see at 30 taking a position.
Like I look at my, when I, my dad and you are the same age, except you are older than my dad by nine weeks.
He's April 10th, you're February 5th.
Both of you guys are in 1942.
He just had a birthday.
Both of you guys just turned 80.
You, like, you know, spending this week with our guys and we're talking about leadership and all this other stuff.
And each decade, I ask myself different questions.
And in that decade, that question was the most important question.
Do you know what I'm saying?
Like, when you're teens, you're asking, man, you know, whatever the question may be in your teens, you know, when am I going to grow?
When am I going to be cool?
When am I going to have a girlfriend?
When can I go?
Whatever questions you ask.
Okay, am I going to get a job?
Am I going to do this?
Okay.
In your 20s, you ask different questions.
In your 30s, you ask different questions.
In your 40s, you have different questions.
Certain questions are constant, right?
What's my purpose?
Why am I here?
What am I doing?
What do you want me to do?
What am I supposed to do?
Am I in the right position I'm at right now?
Am I in the career?
Certain questions are going to be constant, right?
But certain questions, as you age, the weight gets heavier and it gets more important to you at that age than it did a decade or two or three decades ago.
I think that's undoubtedly true.
Well, what is the question that's the heaviest for you at your age?
Because you just turned 80, so I only can tell you what's the most heaviest question at my age.
But what is the heaviest question at your age being 80?
I don't know what it is to be 80.
I only know what it is to be 43.
The heaviest question.
The heaviest question by yourself.
You don't mean the questions that inevitably possess people my age.
So fishing.
Digestion, health, social security.
Those aren't the questions you're talking about.
I'm not.
And by the way, by the way, that's also good for me to know because, you know, I'm talking to a guy when I was in my 20s.
I'm trying to figure out if I want to get married or not because I was actually contemplating even ever getting married.
I enjoy my own company.
I don't know if I want to get married.
So I had to really make sense of does this marriage thing make sense for me?
Maybe it does for other people.
Maybe it doesn't for me.
It was a very difficult question.
So I'd go around asking people the questions.
And then finally, I came down to a point of no matter who you marry, there's a risk, and it's a risk I'm willing to take.
And here's how I can hedge my risk.
But no matter who I marry, there's going to be a risk, right?
And then one, I'm listening to this husband and wife who are in their 60s, late 60s, and then I'm listening to this husband and wife who just got married in their 20s.
And I'm listening to this guy that's early 20s, single, then somebody that's divorced in their 40s, and they're all talking about marriage and relationship.
And eventually this 68-year-old husband and wife says, you know, when I was in my 20s, 30s, I thought it was all about sex.
And let me tell you what happened.
Then health happened.
Then this happened.
Then health happened to me.
And I was, you know, health happened to my wife first.
And I was complaining to her because my wife couldn't have sex with me for nine months.
And then nine months later, the moment we could have sex, then health happened to me.
And I felt so embarrassed because I judged her so much.
And then you're like, oh, interesting.
So maybe one day you're going to go through some of these things with help.
So I learned as a man as I'm aging, right?
I'm trying to learn from you.
Set those questions aside.
What are some heavy questions that, you know, get you thinking at this age?
You lived a pretty good life.
I can complain, certainly not.
Or I could complain, but I shan't.
I think the question, the really heavy questions are sorrowful questions at my age.
And one of the experiences of anyone who has lived the kind of life that I've lived is the discovery that inexorably one has put a certain distance between what one is doing, in my case writing, and the audience one hoped to see.
That is, the separation begins the minute you publish something.
You attract certain readers, you repel other readers.
That's a normal point of equilibrium.
The further you progress in any kind of literary life, on the one hand, you may, if you're lucky, cement a reputation and achieve a certain loyal readership.
But inevitably, you discover that thrill of reaching an audience is disappointed because you are inevitably writing for the past.
That at my age, I can no longer be a fresh voice and therefore no longer attract new readers.
That's exactly how it should be.
Why?
Because of your age, you're saying people are going to be less interested?
They are less interested.
Well, that's not the case for Bernie Sanders.
Nobody gave two craps about him for decades.
And now all of a sudden, of the past five, ten years, he's the, you know, the biggest family.
Lucky Bernie.
You think that's luck?
I don't know, but that's conviction and hard work.
But continue.
I'm curious.
Could be a combination of the both.
Because I think every writer has the same experience that at a certain point, even Philip Roth, at a certain point, that vivid, intense relationship with an audience that every writer imagines is out there palpitating, waiting, hanging on your every word, that disappears.
And I certainly feel that in my own case.
I'm not complaining.
I have readers.
That's not the point.
But in the larger sense, I've lost an audience.
And everything about me is suggestive of anachronism.
That is a time before the present time.
And again, that's inevitable.
One can be in the present, completely in the present, only at a certain age.
The age of discovery, say from 15 to 30 or 15 to 35.
So when you talk about what are some of the deeper aspects of being 80, early middle-aged, as I remarked earlier, that sorrowful discovery that, hey, look, you are about to begin the process of outliving your time.
Nothing wrong with that.
Nothing wrong with that.
But it is not a joyous experience, that discovery.
Neither should it be terribly sorrowful.
It's sorrowful, but it shouldn't be terribly sorrowful.
There are compensations.
You have kids?
Sure.
How old are your kids?
My daughter is, she was born in 1968, and my son was born in 1973.
How did you raise your kids?
Religiously, I'm asking.
In no way.
You said you're secularly Jewish, but you didn't celebrate Hanukkah, Rosh Hashanah, nothing?
Nothing.
Garnished.
And did they celebrate Christmas, American holidays?
Well, it's inescapable.
You celebrate Christmas because you take off from the world.
But you said, hey, by the way, we are Jewish.
You don't really believe that.
I think that the fact that we were Jewish was imprinted on us vividly by my parents, by the Holocaust, by the events of history.
There's no escaping that.
No desire to escape it either.
But in terms, again, of a religious life, not even a suggestion.
And your kids knew your parents.
Oh, yeah.
And your parents fled Germany right at the height of the Holocaust.
They fled Germany in 1932, but for France.
Okay.
Which was a big mistake.
So, right.
Well, this must have had some bearing on your religious views and your parents' religion's views.
said that they prayed to the god of music or the arts or you know they believed in the god of but i know a lot of like i'm jewish i I've had family, grandparents, aunts and uncles that died in the Holocaust.
And I always find it, there's so many Jews that say, I could never believe in God again.
Like, they killed my entire family, killed everyone I know.
And there's some Jews that somehow become more religious, and they cling to that.
What affected the Holocaust and everything that happened.
You're from Germany in the 1940s.
Your family was there.
What effect did that have on your religion?
And then how did that trickle down to your kids?
Because your kids not having any religious basis.
There's got to be something tying this all together.
No, no, no, you've got to pay more attention to what I'm saying.
I didn't say my children have no religious basis.
They grew up as Jews, as I grew up.
They had no religious education, which is quite a different matter.
They never went to temple?
Never went to temple.
They had no bar mitzvah?
No bar mitzvah.
I did.
They didn't.
Okay.
You see the tradition undergoing a gradual dissolution, which I think is characteristic of the Jewish experience, liberal Judaism.
My parents regarded the Holocaust as a confirmation of their Jewish identity.
My father always said the Nazis taught me I was a Jew.
And he was right.
But that doesn't mean he rediscovered a religious faith.
It meant he rediscovered the fact that he was a Jew.
My mother was a Jew.
The family was Jewish.
Culturally.
Far more than culturally.
Being Jewish is not a cultural phenomenon.
At least it's more than that.
It's a deep continuity of historical experience and historical memory.
My grandfather perished in Auschwitz.
My mother never got over that.
And nonetheless, my parents' effort, I'm talking about my parents' effort, to give me a religious education didn't succeed.
I did have a bar mitzvah.
I still remember my bar mitzvah prayers.
But the sad truth of the matter is I found it all excruciatingly boring.
And I still do.
I can attest to that.
I'm not about to spend a whole lot of time in a temple.
What are your kids now?
What are their faith now?
Are they practicing or they're similar to you?
We're all secular.
All secular.
Deeply secular.
And we have all of the vices, but all of the virtues of a secular identity.
That is, we all in some way believe that we're self-created, that the most important thing in our lives collectively is the autonomy of personality, that the personality exists in order to be satisfied, that our desires have an intrinsic value that are quite independent of what other people believe.
I think both my children and I certainly appreciate the fact that to achieve certain things, there's a great deal of discipline involved.
I'm not talking about hedonism, the desire to lead a life such that you're having a good time all the time.
I don't think anyone believes in that.
I live in South Beach.
There might be some people that disagree with you.
South Beach, Florida, I guess.
Yes, yes.
Certainly there are people prepared to say it, but I know very few people, very few satisfied hedonists over the age of 30.
The declaration that you live to have a good time all the time, it becomes very wearying after a while.
But secularism imposes some severe restraints on how you live.
I mean, you cannot rely to an extent, to the extent that it was possible to rely, say, in the 17th or early 18th century, on institutional authorities that at every step of the way guide your footsteps.
Secularism is the prospect of allowing human beings to create themselves anew in each generation.
There's no question about that.
And sometimes it's very difficult, sometimes it's painful, sometimes it's exhilarating.
But as far as I can see, we are all in the position of someone in a lifeboat wondering whether it would be more practicable to sail the seas in an ocean liner.
Well, we don't have an ocean liner anymore.
We've got the lifeboat, secularism, if you will.
And that has to be enough.
We're always in the process of fiddling with a lifeboat, changing the oarlocks, wondering whether we should be sitting in the front or in the back.
But fundamentally, we don't have access to an ocean liner, that majestic ocean liner of faith that has pretty much disappeared.
Do you envy people of faith?
No.
And why is that?
What should I envy them for?
So what do you think comes after life?
I have no idea.
And no idea, and not even something you've thought about, UTK, the body breaks down, it's gone.
Because some say that.
No, no, I'm not committing myself to a view that there is no possibility of experience after death.
I have no privileged insight into that, and no one else does either.
Certainly the fact that every single society in recorded history has had some form of intense speculation about the afterlife is significant because it's a deeply, a deeply essential part of human nature to entertain those convictions.
But again, all I can say is I'll know soon enough.
Please come back and visit us.
I sure will.
You've got to give me your portable number.
What do you think is the – do you have a son?
Or you said 73, right?
73.
He's born 73, she's 68.
Yeah.
Okay.
So the son that's 73, he asks you that, what do you think is the purpose of a man?
And like, what is my purpose?
What am I supposed to do?
Like, if you were, and I know you're going to say to each his own, everybody's different.
Some it's being this, some is being that.
Like, what is my, you know, what purpose do I serve in this world?
What am I supposed to be seeking in life?
Why am I here?
If I'm your son and I ask you the question, what do you tell him?
Well, I think like many other questions that are being asked today, especially in social media, the question is ceremonial more than it is substantive.
I don't think I've ever had a conversation in which my son would pose the question, what is my purpose as a man in life?
You only have one son.
If you were to pose that question, I would say, hey, Dumbo, look at your grandfather.
Imitate that.
In fact, I think I've said exactly that.
Your grandfather is a model of what a man should be.
Why?
Because he was unyieldingly tough, resourceful, highly intelligent, honorable, fought in the Foreign Legion, got my mother out of Germany, got my mother out of France, crossed the Pyrenees on foot, made a new life in the United States, and was enormously proud of the fact that he was one of the few Jews in 1940 to face the Germans with a submachine gun in his hands.
That's enough to be in.
Respect, of course, salute at the highest level.
Yeah.
So that's, if my son were to ask the question, how do I be a man?
I'd say, imitate your grandfather.
David, so remember how I asked you the question, what are some of the heaviest questions at this age, where you're at?
What are some things, some strong convictions you had in your 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, whatever, pick it, that now it's kind of like, you know, yeah, it's not that important.
You know, I used to think XYZ was so important, it's really not that big of a deal.
That's a very good question, except for the concluding part.
I don't have many where I say it's... I was...
When you were 60 or in the 1960s?
In the 1960s.
You've got to remember I was not a baby boomer.
I was born in 1942, so I was three years older than the generation to which I was exposed in the classroom.
And I have to say, in my own defense, I was very suspicious of the 1960s, although I participated enthusiastically.
I encouraged my students to rip up their draft card while keeping mine pristine condition.
God forbid I should go to jail for my convictions.
And when I heard in 1964 the Rolling Stones Painted Black, which was a very popular song in the early 1960s, I realized that the sexual revolution was imminent, was about to break loose.
I mean, it didn't take a whole lot of perspicacity to realize that.
But I must say that all of those impulses, hedonistic impulses, which seem to make so much sense, destroy everything, rebuild everything on a peaceful, sexually enlightened basis, the hell with the family, the hell with commitments, the hell with patriotic concerns, simply develop your own sensibility and live as gloriously as possible in the satisfaction of any desire,
no matter how vagrant, remote, or degraded.
That was part of the 60s, and it came to catastrophe.
The 60s did not end well.
We did incredible, incalculable damage to American society in the 60s.
And I watched it all happen.
I was far too Zijeun or even stupid to recognize it in front of me.
Even my objections to the Vietnam War were puerile.
And I thought the Vietnam War was a catastrophe because I was 1A.
I certainly wasn't about to go off to Vietnam to see my own ass blown off.
That was out of the question.
My father did not approve of that attitude.
He did not approve of that attitude.
He didn't say anything, but every son can feel a father's disapproval.
He thought there was something scandalous about being unwilling to defend your country by joining the military.
Looking back, I'm not really prepared to make a judgment.
To this day, I don't think the Vietnam War has received the kind of scholarly attention that it really does deserve.
It's too early.
I mean, the Vietnam War ended in 1973, 1974.
It's going to take 100 years before we really understand the wars, Indo-Chinese wars of succession.
And don't forget they began in 1945.
The French were chased out, then the Americans were chased out.
But I do think that in 1962, 1963, and this remains an abiding conviction, not quite an answer to your question, but perhaps illustrates the nature of the question, that no American president could have done anything other than what Kennedy and Johnson did do.
I think that's true.
And that's a very curious point because it puts the entire structure of the anti-war movement in a different perspective.
I have a lot more respect now than I did in the 60s for my father's attitude about honor demanding a willingness to serve.
A lot more respect.
I got a lot of respect for your father's level of appreciation as a patriot to what this country probably gave him and his family, where he was.
You have no idea.
Oh, it's honorable to have that mindset.
Totally honorable.
But go back to the question.
I actually want you to put some energy into this one here and think about it, because I want to learn from you.
What are some convictions you had early on?
And I get 60s as one of them.
That was great.
Give me another one.
What are some convictions you had where now it's like, yeah, I don't know why I dwelled over that.
It wasn't that big of a deal.
It seems to me, to be honest, that the questions over which I intensely dwelled were that big of a deal.
The nature of family life, the nature of marriage, the nature of commitment.
I don't think those could properly be said to be not that big of a deal.
I think they were very much a big deal.
So whatever you spend a lot of time thinking about ended up being very important issues that you spent a lot of time thinking about.
You mean very important issues to me or very important issues period.
To you, I'm just trying to learn from you.
Yeah, so to you, period.
Yeah.
I think the fact that you dwell on certain things.
I mean, obviously there's psychological states where it's unwholesome and unhealthy morbidly to be attached to certain ideas just don't go anywhere.
They spin.
But if a man says, I've spent a lot of time thinking about that, a lot of time involved in the emotional discontent these thoughts provide, that's a pretty good indication that he thinks they're important, don't you think?
I do.
I do.
David, when you walk in the streets and somebody identifies you or somebody sees you and says, oh my God, I've read your books and I've heard this.
You know, you help me, dot, dot, dot.
What is the most common thing you hear from people who are fans of yours, who have read your material, who have followed your philosophies?
What did you inspire them to do?
Well, I think that the people who actually break the privacy barrier to come up to me, and there haven't been many, trust me.
Once or twice I've been recognized in the streets, and that's about it.
But I'm talking about even in when you're giving speeches, I'm talking about you're in a university, you're giving a talk, or you're at a debate, and somebody comes up to you and says, David, you help me, Papa Paul.
What do they tell you inspired them to do?
I think the formal aspect is I'm very grateful for being provocative and opening up certain questions that I wouldn't have thought about myself.
And that happens fairly often.
Thank you for asking those kinds of questions.
Thank you for being skeptical about that kind of position.
Thank you for being unskeptical about other kinds of positions.
And that happens often.
The much more emotionally loaded compliment or remark is, thank you for being so provocative.
And you never know quite what is meant, whether they're thanking you for taking the flack, being a scapegoat, or genuinely thanking you for saying what in other contexts would be unsayable.
It's never clear.
You always run the risk, if you're a man in my position, of coming perilously close to self-parody.
You always run that risk.
Just saying things for the effect.
Okay, so today, with what's going on, you said something, you said the secular movement.
You said 200 years ago, I would say probably Woodrow Wilson when they took Bible out of school and people stopped having to go through some of the things.
So for me, it would be 117 years ago, maybe, but let's just say you say 200 years ago, fine.
The secular movement where man fears a higher power less.
It's like, whatever.
Yeah, I get it.
It's totally fine.
Sure.
We're no longer seeing, hey, president get up and give us a prayer or you go to school and prayer.
And whether you believe or not, the power of prayer is a way of telling a kid that, hey, there's somebody that's watching over you where you're by yourself and you're fearing you don't have to commit suicide because you can pray and speak to somebody.
You are not by yourself.
Somebody has your back.
I just see the side effects of the direction we're going without a God, whether it's true or not.
Because the way I look at it is I look at it, if you start a country, let's just say you start a country today and the five of us are going to start a country.
You're going to be the president.
I'm going to be a general of a military.
He's going to be the one that's checking everyone's IDs to see how good looking they are, whatever.
Kai's going to do a different job.
Tyler's going to do a different job.
Would I build my country on a foundation of a faith or without it?
I think whether people believe in the faith or not, to build it on a foundation of a faith is going to have a higher chances of doing better than one not being built on a certain set of values and principles.
Because if you don't, then people are going to create their own set of values and principles.
So if we're not living by the same set of values and principles, then I don't have to meet your values and principles.
I don't care what you believe in.
I don't believe in what you believe in.
So I don't have to be committed to your values and principles.
I can do whatever the hell I want to do.
I don't care if I earn your loyalty or your trust or your relationship.
Then there's that confusion, right?
So for somebody like yourself, because you know that whole thing.
You said this on the last podcast.
Strong leaders build good times.
Good leaders build weak leaders.
Weak leaders build bad times.
Bad leaders build strong leaders.
And that whole thing's going.
Do you think your generation, now your fathers, do you think your generation is a generation of strong leaders?
My generation?
No, exceptionally weak leaders.
So isn't, okay.
And you said that.
So if that's the case and that's what you're saying, what do you think is the responsibility of your generation to share with maybe our generation so we don't continue that same, you know, so we can learn something.
So say, hey, you guys got to pay attention to X, Y, Z. Let me tell you what's going on right now in the world, specifically in America.
I've been in Paris for 25 years.
I've been watching you guys from the outside.
The America I'm used to is America used to be.
But today's America's.
You guys got to be careful with these five things.
You have zero interest in.
That's not a question you're going to get me to answer.
You know that.
No, I don't know that.
Yeah, of course.
I mean, how can I appear?
Gamble a little bit.
No, how can I appear as a prophet?
Do I have any interest?
I don't say prophet.
No, I don't.
Well, it's a prophetic task here.
No, but I'm talking.
Look, no, look, for example, okay.
Say if he's dating a girl, okay?
And he says, Pat, he hasn't done it yet.
But if he says, Pat, this is the first time I'm asking you for a double date because I want to get your opinion on it.
He's never asked me, which means what?
He's never dated a girl that's that serious, okay?
He's never asked me.
But the day comes when he asks me, I want to go on a double date.
I think this thing's getting a little bit serious.
I want to get your feedback on it.
Okay.
So we go, and I meet her, and we walk away.
And he says, so what do you think?
And I had a two and a half hour dinner with her.
So I really got a chance.
She sat right in front of me and he sat right in front of my wife.
So they're talking and I'm learning about her, right?
And what do you think?
And I say, you know, I would suggest papa.
I really like their energy.
I think you guys are going to be good.
But, you know, I take my time.
I would give some kind of counsel as a friend to look at for my friend, my brother, right?
I would give some kind of a counsel to say, here's, it's not necessarily prophetic, but it's more counsel to say, odds-wise, the odds are, son, here's what I would do before you get married.
The odds are, if you want to take care of you, I've been a financial advisor for 20 plus years, right?
I don't sit with a client and saying, guaranteed we're going to get you 12%.
I can't say guaranteed you're going to heaven.
Guaranteed America is going to be better.
I'm asking you based on odds and your wisdom in your life.
What do you tell us?
What can we be prepared for?
Because we don't want to get another bad time.
If you want to go out and introduce me to your girlfriend, I'll give you my honest.
If you want my wisdom, my inexpressible wisdom about the cost of American society and a recommendation for what we collectively should be doing, I have to discourage you.
I don't have that.
I don't have that.
Why are you playing safe, though, David?
Why are you playing so safe?
I don't know why you're, you know, you said something earlier.
You said, you know, the level of interest in people in me right now is, you know, like versus what it used to be at this age.
I'm the opposite.
Like, I enjoy talking to people when their age starts with an eight.
I don't know.
I can't tell you how many people I've interviewed.
That's another respect in which we're different.
I don't.
Oh, I know you don't.
I'm telling you.
Well, your interest is different than my interest is, but my interest is I want to suck as much wisdom from you as possible because that's the edge in life.
I pray for four things.
Courage, wisdom, tolerance, understanding.
But for me, like I have a painting in the club room.
You know who's in the clubroom?
Everybody in the painting that I have, I'm in it, plus seven other people.
The seven other people that are in it, none of them are here.
All right, let me ask you a question.
Yes, please.
Let me ask you a question.
Go forward.
What kind of answer would satisfy you coming from my lips?
You don't have to be specific, just in general.
I would tell you what kind of answer would satisfy me.
The answer that is the most thought out answer and as real as possible.
I'm not looking for an answer that I want to hear.
That's not my style.
I'm a leader.
I'm not soft.
I'm strong.
I'm looking for an answer for you to give to say, here's where my generation screwed up, okay?
If I had it my way, as much as I'm somebody that's agnostic, I do think faith plays a very important role.
Or maybe it's not.
Maybe it's we got soft because we didn't pay attention to the XYZ, and we should have.
You know, I noticed America kind of went this direction.
They try to be too much like Europe, and they shouldn't have.
America was the leader.
They try to be like, I don't know what it is, but whatever's in your mind to say, here's what I would pass down to you.
Because you said weak leaders, your generation.
I did not say it.
You said, you said your dad is the epitome of a leader where your son was born in 1973.
If you're going to be a man's man, look at your grandpa.
And I agree, that's a man's man, right?
But I'm asking you, what can we learn from what you've seen so we don't screw this shit up?
Because I got four kids.
I got a 10, 8, and a 5-year-old and a 9-month-old.
You just saw the five-year-old in here.
My daughter was in a podcast running around.
I want to learn from you, sincerely.
I want to learn from you so I don't screw it up myself.
All I can tell you is, I've been out of the country for 25 years now.
My experience has all been centered in France.
Coming back regarding the United States, it seems to me, on the one hand, an enormous amount of energy is present in the United States, an enormous amount of exhilaration, an enormous amount of optimism, strangely enough.
And at the same time, I can see very clearly they're all consuming social divisions, cultural and social divisions.
All right, I see it.
Are you asking me for a diagnosis and the respect in which my generation made decisions that led to this?
Well, sure, that's inevitably true.
The generation that came to power in the 1960s witnessed a collapse of authority.
That's unmistakably true, a collapse of political, moral, intellectual, social, and sexual authority.
And that has reverberated for the succeeding 50 years.
There's no question about that.
We're still living with decisions made in the 1960s, say the period between 1962 and 1971, 1972, when tendencies acquired a certain fixity of direction.
But that's not necessarily to say anything about a generation screwing up, because that inculpates a generation in something they did deliberately.
And I think the fundamental facts of the 1960s is not that anyone did anything deliberately, but they were all victims of a process of interior collapse.
Not the first time in the 20th century we've seen that.
I mean, you can go to France and say the 1930s and see a very similar dynamic at work.
So, no, I don't think it's a question that my generation or the baby boomer generation screwed up, but that at a certain period of time, a great many contingencies occurred simultaneously.
The wars of Indo-Chinese succession, proceeding apace no matter what the Americans did or thought socially or culturally.
The assassination of JFK, which no one expected, which disrupted the political continuity of American life.
The ascension to power of Lyndon Johnson, who was a magnificent domestic politician, but very inexperienced in foreign policy.
The progressive aging of a foreign policy establishment that successfully fought the Second World War and navigated the Cold War with the Russians in the 1950s.
The fact that there was an enormous increase in young people aged 15 to 25 as the result of the end of the Second World War.
That's why they were called the baby boomer generation.
The fact that every time there's an enormous cohort, population cohort, a bulge in the population, there's bound to be some sort of strife, fraternal strife, social strife, because every new generation needs to be disciplined and domesticated.
The larger the generation, the more difficult it is to enforce the authority of the previous generations.
All these things came together in the 1960s.
Nobody intended that they came together.
They come together.
They did come together.
And we are living with the repercussions ever since.
In addition to all that, the 1960s was a continuation of an historical process that goes back at least to the French Revolution, that is, the increasing secularization of the social order, the withdrawal of established institutions of religion, for example, the Catholic Church in France, but the Protestant clergy in the United States as well.
And you can trace it out step by step.
If you look at English poetry from 1820 to 1850, you can see an arc.
1820, you have someone like Lord Byron saying the Assyrian came down like a wolf on the folds and his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold.
And the poem is about the destruction of an Assyrian army.
The poem ends.
The famine.
You're talking about the famine?
No, the destruction of Sennacheri.
Got it.
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword, hath withered like snow in the glance of the Lord.
Now, this is a flimsy poem.
It's not a great piece of poetry.
The date is 1822, and Byron could write in the expectation that every one of his readers would understand that he was participating in what was still a Christian society.
It may not have been a completely committed Christian society, but the architecture was as plain as the architecture of Notre Dame.
You go 30 years into the future.
It's not a long time.
You have Matthew Arnold writing Dover Beach.
He says, Oh, my beloved, let us be true to one another, for the world which lies about us like a land of dreams hath neither really joy, nor light, nor life, nor certitude, nor peace, nor health from pain.
And we are as on a darkling plane, swept by confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night.
That's a completely different worldview.
Byron could not have understood that.
He's talking about the melancholy, long withdrawal of faith from the European continent.
30 years, you see a change, a dramatic change in the diaphragm of European life.
And you can continue that right through to T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Philip Larkin.
The decline has been not necessarily linear, but it's been inexorable.
So all these things play a role in talking about, when I talk about the generation that came just after me, the baby boomer generation, I don't think any lessons can be learned for what are historical necessities.
What we see is a great many contingencies occurring at the same time, roughly the same 10-year period, and then bang, a lot of different trajectories set as if they were canals, canals dividing the sand.
That's very different.
I can talk until I'm blew in the face about the collapse of authority, which I witnessed myself in a university setting.
I saw all the people I respected deeply, for example, crumble in the face of student protests.
Just crumble.
I saw that at Columbia.
I saw that at Princeton.
I saw that at Stanford, less at Stanford, but I saw it at Berkeley as well.
Berkeley, of course.
And, you know, you have pig ignorant people like Mario Savio at Berkeley getting up on top of a car and denouncing a system which was in every respect one of the glories of American democracy, the California University system.
And the university officials, I was right there.
I watched them saying, yeah, yeah, you're right, you're right.
Bow down low, scrape the ground with their nose.
And all that I could think of at the time, and a few other people thinking the same thing.
How dismal to see this great tongue fall so low as to lick the dust.
Do you think professors have more voice today or in the 70s, 80s, 90s?
They've had an unwholesome effect since the 50s.
That is the American professoriate, but I think also in England and France, it's true.
Well, then let me ask the question in a different way.
So the whole thing with your generation, where it's led to today, there's two things I think about.
Like I think about when I see an office or I see a CEO or a business owner or a leader, I just spend two days with a bunch of patriots and they're talking about Bill Belichick.
And I said, from the first time you played for the guy when he hadn't won a Super Bowl yet, this is Matt Light, to him now, who he's won six Super Bowls, is known as one of the greatest coaches of all time, if not the greatest coach of all time.
What changed with him?
Did his standards drop?
Did he get easier to work with?
What happened with him?
You know what everybody in that room said?
They said, one thing about Bill Belichick is his standards never dropped, right?
That's why he keeps winning because you have to constantly raise up to his standards.
But what the NFL did, they used to be able to do two-day trainings and they changed it in 2011 where you couldn't do it anymore.
And Belichick used to train on Fridays.
No team trained on Fridays because you got a game on Sunday.
Why would you train on Fridays?
You had Fridays off, you had Tuesdays off.
These guys are like, no, this guy was constantly here.
Rob talked about the fact that for nicest for, he says, I remember playing in college.
I remember playing in high school.
I remember playing for Miami.
I remember playing for New Orleans.
I don't remember what happened the nine years I was at Patriots because it went like this.
Wow.
He said, all I know is we won two Super Bowls.
All the other places, we didn't win.
Which means what?
The standards would risen.
So the question comes to you.
Do you think there was an element of the lowering of standards gradually?
Ah, it's okay.
You don't think standards were dropped over the years?
I think standards were dropped, but I don't think that was the cause.
I think it was the effect.
What was the cause?
The cause was, I think you have to appreciate how little we really understand these great pivotal moments in history.
1961, 1962, 1963, every figure in authority had reached a certain age.
Not the age of great flexibility, but a certain age, and had a certain repository of wisdom.
They were confronted by an enormous group of young people flaunting their sexuality, their physical prowess.
They were confronted in Yeats' terms of the young in one another's arms.
And it undid them.
It unmanned them.
They didn't know how to respond.
They were certainly prepared to face the Nazis all over again, or to face the communists, but to face their own children in the luxurian frivolity of sexual embrace was beyond them.
Nothing in their training had prepared them to deal with the rebellion by their own children.
And that's what took place in the 1960s, 1963 to 1971, 1972.
And it's still to a certain extent taking place right now.
I mean, after all, the overwhelming impression that the United States affords to any foreign eye is that every successive generation in its taste, proclivity, desires, avelities, ambitions, seems to be more infantile than the generation it replaces.
Certainly, if you look at American music, American culture, American life, it seems intensely infantile.
At least from a certain perspective.
That began in the 1960s.
It began with the collapse of authority.
If you're asking me, why did these people allow their own authority to collapse?
There's no answer beyond the one I gave you, that certain sites are not meant to be seen by the elderly.
And unfortunately, you have a huge population of young people who happen to be affluent.
That's another factor.
The first generation that didn't have to retire to a factory to the field in order to feed themselves.
They had disposable income.
They could play at leisure.
The first generation that happened to be affluent, displaying immemorial human urges, simply undid the figures in authority throughout American life.
And I saw it.
I saw it with my own eyes.
Last question I'm going to ask, and I'm going to turn it over to you guys and we'll go to callers.
It's the last question I'm going to have with you on this topic is which institution do we trust too much that we should have never given them that much power and trust?
Universities.
Okay, I agree.
Okay.
Universities.
Tell me.
Unpack that, please.
And when did that happen when we trusted them way too much?
The degree to which the university has become a democratic institution is a function of the decision undertaken in the 1940s and 1950s to open it up to everyone.
Don't forget, before 1940, university education was a very aristocratic education.
It was restricted to very few people.
It had protocols of admission.
Wealth was involved.
But also intellectual ability.
1940, 1950, there was an enormous experiment in the United States to broaden the franchise, in effect.
What was neglected in this is that the professoriate, since time immemorial, has been kind of a monastic order.
That is, the injunction placed on people who want to do academic work is that, yes, if you're talented enough, you can withdraw from society.
You can live a quasi-monastic life.
You won't be earning a great deal, but you'll be doing the work that is necessary for you to do, and you'll be teaching the next generation.
Again, as the franchise was enormously expanded, this changed.
Becoming a professor became a very lovely racket.
I know, I did.
You had lots of money, lots of free time.
You had an endless panoply of attractive young people in your audience.
You could do pretty much as you wanted for four months of the year.
There was all sorts of additional sources of financing available.
It attracted an enormous number of people who had never had any experience beyond the academic world.
Look, I went from Bronx Science to Columbia College, from Columbia College to Princeton, from Princeton to Stanford, and never once did I do an honest day's worth of work in anything beyond an academic setting.
I had no idea what work outside the academic world was.
I discovered very soon, of course, that I was completely unqualified, untalented when it came to work outside the academic world.
But you have a whole generation who has not had that experience, that discovery of the limitations of their academic competence.
And of course, the result inevitably is the growth of an extremely arrogant, priestly class, perfectly prepared to tell the rest of us how to live, what to do.
And beyond the physical sciences, beyond physics and chemistry, to a certain extent biology, certainly mathematics, very much prone to crackpot theories.
Very much prone to conspiracy theories, crackpot theories, ludicrous ideas about human nature, undocumented, unreferenced assertions, avowals, I mean, that versions that make absolutely no sense in retrospect, but nonetheless swept through the academic world one after the other.
You're not going to make too many friends and all our professors listening to this.
We'll see.
By the way, we just had a moment.
Exactly.
We just had a moment.
We just took a risk.
Yes.
It took an hour and 31 minutes for my guest today to take a risk.
There's a lot of professors saying, Berlinski, when I run into dice.
We're going to play roulette tonight.
Go ahead, Adam.
You would ask that question at the beginning.
I asked you 50 questions that you could have taken a little bit more.
In mind, I wasn't safe.
Safe.
Can I go a totally different direction with this?
Anywhere you want to go, because cars are waiting, by the way.
This is a question that I think you're qualified to answer.
I appreciate an answer.
This has to do with mathematics, religion, evolution.
The great American scholar, philosopher that we talked about earlier by the name of Joe Rogan, had a bit.
Back in 2009, he did a stand-up comedy.
You know Joe Rogan?
By name.
Okay.
He sends his regards.
He had a bit or a stand-up special called Talking Monkeys in Space, where he's having a conversation, right?
You got the title.
He's having a conversation with a guy about his faith.
And the guy's like, I came from Jesus, bro.
Like, straight up, I'm from Jesus.
I have faith.
I came from Jesus.
And Joe goes, how do you know so much?
Aren't you like 30?
Like, how do you know so much?
And Joe Rogan basically says, look, you know what I do?
I don't know everything, but I like to memorize shit that a lot of smart people have come up with.
And I basically just kind of read what they've already kind of put together, and I just kind of regurgitate that.
And one of the things that they found is something called the human genome.
You familiar with this concept?
The human genome.
So basically, he says what they found in the human genome is that we, us humans, are 96% chimpanzee.
96% chimpanzee.
This is his bit.
And he says, and sort of jokingly now, if I gave you a sandwich and it was 96% shit and 4% ham, are you willing to call that a ham sandwich?
And basically saying, we're monkeys, bro.
We're freaking monkeys flying through space.
And he basically saying that that's the evolution right there.
You're a mathematician.
Is Joe Rogan right here?
And please refute him if he's wrong.
There were so many vivid voices emerging just now.
I'm not quite sure who's saying what.
The doctrine that...
Did we come from monkeys?
Are we 96%?
I mean, is there an evolutionary path from our simian ancestors to you?
Yeah, of course there is.
Nobody doubts that.
No, no, no.
Some people do doubt that.
That's why I'm asking.
Not here.
Okay.
We're not about to doubt that.
Taking a stand and saying that we did come from apes.
But that's uncontroversial.
It is, though, I feel.
No.
So you're taking a stand and saying that we did come from apes.
You're wrong.
It's not controversial.
Nobody, when pressed, will really deny.
Because you have to endow come from apes with a certain amount of content.
If you mean come from apes by a process of random variation and natural selection, I'll say, wait a second, I don't think that's quite accurate.
If you mean to say there's overwhelming evidence that there are evolutionary transitions, we can walk the human line back and actually see the patterns emerging from both the fossil record and the paleontological record.
Of course, that's true.
There is no evidence that it is anything other than that, which is perfectly compatible with the doctrine of creation, by the way.
How's that?
Because that seems incompatible.
No.
Evolution and creationism, I thought that's at different ends of the spectrum.
It depends what you mean by evolution.
If you mean you can trace your ancestors back and sooner or later you will run into something that looks markedly unlike you, but in a certain way resembles you, sure, that's uncontroversial.
You can do it genetically, you can do it in terms of the fossil record.
If you mean, on the other hand, that at a certain point something new emerged for which we have very little understanding, that too can be argued.
For example, although there is a striking sequence similarity, it's certainly not 98%.
It's somewhere in the 80s.
And there are a lot of questions about how those sequences are mapped one to the other.
Don't forget, until very recently, we did not have a complete human genome.
But if you look at human beings and you look at our presumptively nearest ancestors, there's an unfathomably large distance between us.
Unfathomably large.
We are completely different.
We have properties not seen in the rest of the animal kingdom.
We have behaviors not seen in the rest of the animal kingdom.
We have a cognitive apparatus that's not seen in the rest of the animal kingdom.
So, on the one hand, yes, I can go backwards progressively, chasing ancestors and saying, well, there's a line of derivation that makes perfect sense.
No point in disguising that.
But at the same time, when we reach the stage of human beings, there's an explosion of very interesting and very isolated properties.
Both those things are true.
Richard Dawkins wrote a book, and one of the more vivid examples that I remember from this book, I think it was called The Magic of Reality.
Is that what it's called?
I think so.
He talks about that if you take a picture, like you talked about your grandfather or your father, your grandfather, if you take a picture and you just keep going back and you go thousands of pictures, you're going to run to like a great, great-grandfather that looks like Krogue Magnum man.
And then if you go back, thousands, thousands, thousands of pictures, you're going to run to some sort of ape.
And then if you go back, to the freaking beginning, picture, picture, picture.
Fond of smoking cigars or something, or I don't know.
And the other question I had was: are you perhaps in too elevated of a position to where maybe you get down in the dirtiness of it and perhaps you have a religious moment?
And generally speaking, that's my question.
And also, the third is with things like the Soviet Union and France, where you had situations where they're trying to get rid of religion, and there was a counter push against that, and religion isn't gone.
And a lot of these are intellectual pursuits and such from where they push this.
I was wondering what his opinion was on that.
And does it lead to sort of a mindset where, you know, you're just going along with the status quo?
Because I've run into certain conversations with people where, you know, they don't want to take a position after they, you know, after like, if you don't believe in God, perhaps maybe you're, you know, then what's the point in living kind of thing for some people?
And I've had some conversations with them where they're borderline nihilistic.
What's your thoughts on that?
Well, there are three and a half questions.
The first question about an indirect path is a very interesting question.
And of course, every serious religion has talked about that or written about that.
The position of the Catholic Church, for example, is crystal clear.
And it can be summed up very simply.
If you behave as if you believed in God, faith will be given to you.
Which is an extremely sophisticated and subtle declaration.
Do I know that that's true?
No, I don't know that that's true, but I think it might well be true.
Faith is given to those who act as if they had faith.
That's the first question, I think, which touches on questions of indirectness.
And I think it's a very penetrating question because the direct approach very often proves fruitless.
You can't hammer a religious conviction into someone.
You can terrify them into pretending, but that's not quite the same thing.
The second question, if I recall it correctly, was the extent to which certain desperate experiences can easily provoke a man to at least the affirmation of a religious conviction.
That goes back to the question we were discussing an hour ago.
Call them extreme situations.
The trouble with extreme situations is if you push extremity to the limit, they can do one of two things.
They can reinforce or create a sense of faith, or they can destroy it completely.
I know many people who entered the concentration camps as Orthodox Jews and left despairing, suicidal.
By the same token, I know some people who found strength in their religious tradition when they emerged from the concentration camps.
So I don't think that's a very good piece of evidence.
Certainly, we all know of the temptation in combat and the aphorism, which I think is quite true.
There are no atheists in the foxholes.
That may well be true.
I've never been in a foxhole.
I can't speak with personal authority.
The third question is, can we say anything intelligent, rational, reasonable about the experiences of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany with respect to the collapse or undermining of religious convictions as social institutions?
And yeah, I think we can.
I don't think anyone is ever going to count Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Adolf Hitler as among the religious leaders of mankind.
And there's a reason for that.
I think attempts to say that Nazism and Stalinism were themselves negative nihilistic religions, those are unsuccessful.
They weren't.
They were essentially contemptuous of religious experience, atheistic to the core.
You know, Stalin at the end of his life may have had some use for priestly intervention.
He was a suspicious man.
But certainly they acted, all of the totalitarian figures in the 20th century acted as if there were no possibility of ever being held to account for their crimes.
I think that's the real issue.
John, do we have any other callers?
Yes, we have Sienna on the phone.
Sienna, how are you?
Hi, good evening.
I'm good.
How are you guys?
Fantastic.
What's on your mind?
What's your question?
First, I guess I just wanted to say thank you for guys that you do.
One question, Mr. Belinski.
If the poorest man has the richest heart, is he really poor?
I'm sorry.
What was the first part of that?
She said, if the first man has the richest heart, is his poorest heart.
Sorry.
The poorest heart is his saved.
No, sorry.
We can't hear you by the way.
Your audio is very low.
That's why.
Oh, if the poorest man has the richest heart, is he really poor?
Oh, yeah.
No question about it.
But is he rich in something beyond what the question is addressed to?
It's always possible, but I think that almost a universal experience of religious life is that there is a level of deprivation which makes concentration on anything beyond material sustenance very difficult.
So you can say if a man is poor, he may nonetheless be rich in wisdom, which certainly true.
But he remains poor.
It's bad news.
We got some bad news for you.
That man is still poor.
I don't know if it's a man.
He's still a poor man financially.
But let's go to the next one, John.
Yeah, we have Michael on the line.
Michael, how are you doing?
How's it going, Patrick?
But David, can anybody hear me?
Adam?
What's on your mind?
Awesome.
My question is for the man of the hour, and as well as everybody else in there, do y'all believe math was invented or created?
Well, is there a big distinction between being invented and being created?
I'm not sure.
Usually, it's posed as, did human beings create mathematics or did they discover mathematics?
Is that the question?
Yeah, it's just the question of do you think that humans invented math or was math just always from the beginning of the universe?
Was it always a difficult question because they're fairly interesting philosophical arguments, but my commitment would be to say it's obviously this is not a human invention.
It has no properties like a human invention.
So God created it.
I didn't say that.
I didn't say it.
And you know I didn't say it.
His faith has increased.
But your faith has increased in the last hour.
No.
No, it hasn't increased today.
I've noticed it in the future.
It's the same robust level it was when I entered the discussion.
But the point is we have a very difficult problem talking about mathematics because these are objects that are obviously not physical.
The number one is not a physical object, neither is the number seven.
And they don't seem to be in time in quite the way we want objects of contemplation to be in time.
It doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to say, well, the number three came into existence in 1932.
It doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
You can say that.
There are philosophers who will say anything.
But they do not elicit a whole lot of respect by that kind of declaration.
Well, if it didn't come into existence at any particular time, does that mean that they're eternal in some sense?
Well, yeah, I think it does.
Although I can't tell you what being eternal means, since there's a conflict between the view of a mathematician and the view of a physicist.
A physicist will say space and time arose.
Space and time arose with the creation of the universe at the Big Bang.
Before the Big Bang, on one theory of cosmology, there was nothing.
And not even the laws of mathematics.
That's a view I find personally repugnant and intellectually unaccommodating.
But there it is.
Some people believe that.
But as far as the invention of mathematics goes, I don't know of anyone who studied mathematics seriously that thinks this stuff was all made up.
Not a soul.
Good question, Doug.
I have a question as well.
You talked about as being a secular Jew in terms of that over time, kind of the religion erodes and it kind of goes downwards.
Do you think that the role of religion, what that has played in history, has been an overall good thing or a bad thing?
God, you guys are unbelievable.
These are incredibly difficult questions.
I just had occasion to write a long essay about the British Empire.
Was the British Empire from 1600 to 1949 when it finally ended or 1960 when all the various colonies gained independence, was it a force for good or a force for bad?
And you look at it, you study it seriously, you studied it historically, you come to the conclusion it's too soon to tell.
Well, you think it's any easier to make the claim with respect to the Roman Empire, say from the age of Augustus to the fifth century when the Roman Empire and the West collapsed?
Historians are still enraged with one another because one half of the historical community will say, the Roman Empire was rapacious, it was cruel, it was monstrous, overbearing.
Dr. Johnson has a famous remark about the Roman Empire.
These people lived by stealing from strangers, and when they ran out of strangers from which to steal, they stole from one another.
That was his view of the Romans.
On the other hand, we have to say without the Roman Empire, the entire glorious tradition of Western history would have been aborted 2,000 years ago.
So it's a very difficult question to answer.
Has the role of religion, has religion been a good thing overall?
Has it been a bad thing?
It's been an inescapable thing.
It's been a necessary feature of our existence.
And we can certainly point to good things and bad things.
Obviously so.
The good things and the bad things don't quite get to the essence of the moral question we were talking about an hour, an hour and a half ago, whether without the structure of divine authority, a completely moral or acceptable social life is possible.
That's a question that we have yet to answer.
So since maybe our booker didn't manage expectation, he should have said we only ask tough questions.
But I've got a question for you I think you may like, and it's not going to be complicated.
Go ahead.
Do you like ice cream?
Yeah.
Okay, then so you can't tell us.
All we do is ask you tough questions.
That's a very spiritual experience for some people when they have the right kind of ice cream.
John, give us a last caller before this man decides to increase his faith and become a Christian pastor by the time we're done.
Watch David move from France to Fort Lauderdale, build one of the biggest churches here, and thousands of people show up.
Edgo.
There you go.
He's probably more likely to build in a church in some sort of speaking of church.
Hang on, do we have a caller?
We have one last caller.
Yes, Cameron's on the line.
Cameron.
Cameron's back.
Cameron, how you doing?
Good.
One question.
Do secularists credit religion for promoting the golden rule?
Do unto others as you would have others do unto you?
Yeah.
Yes.
That's what you're talking about?
Yes.
Depends who you're listening to.
I think the golden rule is kind of a folk apothem.
I mean, every culture somehow discovers it.
Some assign it to a theological province.
Some assign it to just good common sense.
It appears almost in every culture.
It doesn't appear from the beginning.
You go through the Greeks, for example.
They had no use for the golden rule.
Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.
Well, that's okay, except for the slaves, except for women, except for a small social circle.
The Romans also had difficulty with these kind of essentially Christian doctrines.
Not until the third and fourth century as Christianity achieved dominance in the Roman Empire.
Were these sentiments taken for granted as part of accumulated wisdom?
But yeah, every culture has encountered the golden rule, and I would be very skeptical about saying it's uniquely a religious principle.
We got four more minutes if you got any questions, or you're good.
Well, I just, before I joined the church in Fort Lauderdale, I wanted to know if you had any definitive, strong opinions on Jesus Christ.
Yes.
Meaning, what are you willing and definitively able to say about the life of Jesus?
That one time you guys had sushi together, how was it like?
Meaning, he existed.
Check.
I think this is the same.
Was he born from the Virgin Mary?
I don't know.
Was he resurrected?
Too soon to tell.
What can you definitively say about Jesus?
You've just said it.
Okay.
That's it.
That's it.
So I answered myself.
I mean, look, how could you be asking a secular Jew for his personal opinions about?
Well, Jesus was a Jew, so, you know, maybe there's a lineage.
If I go back and back and back and back to photographs, I could see a picture of Jesus.
Doubtful.
Doubtful.
So you do not think Jesus was the Son of God based on math?
No.
No.
I mean, look, when I say I'm a secular Jew, I really mean Jewish.
I am not committed to Christian doctrine.
No, I'm not, you don't have to be a believer.
I don't believe in the Trinity either.
So do you believe in Moses?
Do you believe in Abraham?
There are figures from the Bible for which I think there's very good reason to suppose they existed in some fashion or other.
Certainly Moses is an historically attested figure, no matter what Freud had to say about it.
And Jesus is also a reasonably attested historical figure, but whether I believe in, say, the Trinity or the doctrine of insubstantiation, or whether I believe in original sin, or whether I believe in the mystery of faith, or any of these questions, or have a personal relationship with Jesus?
No.
Okay.
Well, before we wrap up the podcast, I think we should all join hands and pray and bow and maybe we just...
David, final words.
Give us...
Give us final words here before we wrap up.
About what?
Whatever you want to talk about.
Tell us, have these tough questions, the challenging you faced, you know, the last hour and 50 minutes, have we solved any of the major questions and problems in the world today?
Any of the major questions and problems in the world today?
Well, you've certainly solved the problem of how best I might occupy myself between 4 and 6 o'clock today in very pleasant conversation.
I think that should be enough for the rest of us.
And you really, your main outcome was met.
People now know you have a very good style of how you dress.
Absolutely know.
So that's been established.
But it was great having you on.
I enjoyed you being a good sport and taking the questions and a pushback back and forth.
It was fantastic.
I hope the audience enjoyed it just as much as we did.
Tomorrow we have Ethan Supley.
Yeah.
Actor, remember the Titan.
Remember the Titans boy.
Okay, fantastic.
Looking for History X.
He lost like 80 pounds or something.
Not even 80 pounds, more than 80 pounds.
Like 180 pounds.
He's jacked now.
Yeah, he's jacked now, so we're excited about having him on tomorrow.
He's what?
Jacked.
Very jacked.
Jacked in French means jacket, like in chains.
That's casteaux.
That's casteau.
But we'll be back same time, same channel, 9 a.m. Wednesday.
