Episode 127: Christopher Beha

Speaker A: My next guest writes fiction and edits one of America's great magazines. But what he's really doing in both jobs is, is asking the same question we wrestle with in the restructuring world. How long can people live inside a story that simply isn't true? He's the author of what Happened to Sophie Wilder and the Index of Self Destructive Acts. And his most recent book is why I'm not an Atheist. And he's the former editor of Harper's Magazine. Christopher, welcome to the Puck.

Speaker B: Thank you so much.

Speaker A: When I read your work, whether or not it's the Index of Self Destructive Acts or Sophie's Wilder, what struck me is that you're seemingly exploring that same tension, which is that how can people, through faith, media, ambition, or otherwise, how do we have these systems where we don't fully understand, we don't want to understand, but we essentially hide from the truth?

Speaker B: I would go a step further and, um, say that one of the questions I'm interested in is the extent to which the truth, sort of capital T can be arrived at. Believe in the truth, in the existence of a capital T, truth. I'm not a sort of postmodern relativist in that way, but what I also believe is that, and this is the teaching you will find, for example, in Christian scripture that says that we see through a glass darkly, that human perception is limited, and that the truth is something, you know, infinite and absolute and really beyond our total comprehension. So we're all engaged in approximations, and some are more or less close to the truth. And it's not that they're all the same because they're all just constructions, you know, because there is something we are trying to map onto. But I. One of the things that I'm interested in in both my fiction and my nonfiction and the subtitle of my new book is Confessions of a Skeptical Believer. And part of what I mean by being both a believer and a skeptic, where the skepticism comes from, is constantly reminding ourselves of our limited human capacities to arrive at the truth and having our approximation that we live by while at the same time being aware this is a limited human approximation. And when other people disagree with us, it doesn't necessarily mean that they're wrong or evil or acting in bad faith, but they, from their own perspective, are trying to arrive at their own approximation. And then it becomes a question of how can we negotiate together to try and collectively get a little closer to the capital T truth.

Speaker A: So, uh, as people are searching for truth, and it sounds like you're Searching for truth. Is there paradox involved in that process? And if so, how does paradox play into it?

Speaker B: There is absolutely. One of the paradoxes of, uh, a project like my most recent book is that. Is that I, I believe that the truth is, is relational, that it emerges from our relationship to the world, our relationship with each other. One of the things that means is that it's not, is that it is experiential, which is to say it can't be the process by which we come to know something, to feel like we know something. The knowledge itself can't be separated from the process, can't be turned into this kind of decontextualized bit of factual content that can then get shared around. So the paradox is that efforts like books like this are precisely efforts to take a, uh, personal experience and turn it into something that can be shared around in that way. And inevitably we engage in that because we want what's meaningful for us to make sense to other people. What we can't do is somehow make it so that someone else has had all entirely the life experiences that we've had. So we have to find some other way of conveying things. I come at this as a literary writer rather than primarily a kind of commentator or polemicist. So I want my work to likewise create an experience rather than to be the container of some truth that could then be paraphrased and taken out of it.

Speaker A: It sounds like what you're saying is that there is this rationalist place, that one of the beauties of fiction is that by giving somebody some kind of cathartic experience, you're starting to let them understand that there is a dimension to the universe that's beyond the rational, that's experiential, where you feel a certain sense of awe, ah, wonder and oneness. But it's not something you can arrive at intellectually. It's more of an experience.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's right. There are many different ways to, to sort of understand this dichotomy, but one pretty simple one, is to think about objectivity versus subjectivity, you know, and there is, I believe, an objective reality out there. Someone like Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who's coming from this scientific background, right. What he believes. Right, is that that objective reality, that is the sum total of what exists. And our job, even though we all have our own subjective viewpoints, is to use the methods of science, experimentation, quantification to prediction, to arrive at greater knowledge of that objective reality. We can all, from our different perspectives, get there eventually through stripping away Things like emotions stripping away our wishes, our hopes, and just saying what's actually there, you know. Um, and I do believe that, that, that science has an incredibly important role in, uh, helping us arrive at that. And I believe that that goal is a very worthwhile goal for many, many, many different reasons at the same time. Our hopes, our wishes, all of the things that go into our passions, that go into our subjectivity, they are also real things. And this, this effort to leave them out of the picture is, is going to give you an incomplete picture, you know. Now what's, what many scientists will say is to the extent that they're real things, they can also be objectively studied. So we have a science like psychology that is a science of studying our emotions, our hopes and fears, right? But that is to again, objectify them, right? But this is the really tricky thing. Not only are these things real, they are real as subject effects, you know, they are real as. And so you are actually not doing justice to them when you make them data points inside the world. You know, um, so that is, you know, the great paradox, right, is how do we come up with a way of understanding reality that does full justice to both our subjective experience and, and the subjective experience of others and the existence of an objective world.

Speaker A: I love the way you frame that. And I definitely talk to people about again, their feelings and their desires and as you talk about this subjective reality. But I think that for me at least, the thing that kind of leads me away from a strict rationalist belief and it's more of a sense of awe, uh, at a place higher than curiosity, is the question I asked Neil DeGrasse Tyson, which, which I didn't get a satisfactory answer of, which was the following. I said, neil, look, I understand that science, if we, there's a lot of things we haven't figured out with science yet, but isn't it true that in our reality that everything has a beginning and an end and was created from something, Meaning there's this concept called creation, exinelia, which is, means something created out of nothing, which is not something we experience. Everything we as human beings build is taking a substance, even if it's an atom, and building from there. So from the perspective of science at least, I said, Neil, there is no answer to how you create something out of nothing. There is no answer to how something either could have always existed, that is energy or matter, or once again came out of the nothing, meaning it's always been there, right? Or it came out of nothing. And I don't believe the Rational scientific brain can comprehend that, and I don't think AI can either. And, and to me, it's a tautology. As human beings, we have to have the humility to know that there's something that we can't understand.

Speaker B: I agree about that. I think that many scientists increasingly think that the discourse around science, the people who are the public advocates of science and the people who are particularly most kind of triumphalist about science's role in explaining literally everything, they tend to speak about science from the vantage point of really where we were in the late 19th, early 20th centuries, particularly after the rise of Darwin. Right. Once Darwin came along and was able to offer a convincing scientific explanation for this appearance of design in the universe, which, which was one of the, the, the great, great puzzles, right? The great mysteries. And one of the things that theists obviously held onto very strongly as evidence for the existence of God. Once science had a convincing alternative to that, it really did become increasingly tempting to think all of the outstanding mysteries are mysteries of this sort that, uh, potentially can be solved in this way. And a few things have happened since then, but one of them is just that breakthroughs in physics, including the breakthroughs in cosmology, that led people to. Because as of the time that Darwin was writing, by the way, the prevailing scientific view was that the universe had existed forever. When you asked where it came from, the common response was, well, who says it has to have come from somewhere? You know, and it was, you know, work by Einstein in the early 20th century that, that first started to suggest that, that, that the universe was expanding and that therefore it needed to have. Have come from a, an infinitely small point. Uh, and it was in fact a Catholic priest who proposed the, the Big Bang as the alternative anyway, that that created a problem. The question of what was there before space and time came into existence in the Big Bang, that, that, that a great many scientists would say that, uh, that is just outside of the bounds of what science could possibly study, you know, and there are, there are physicists now who, who, who say, you know, the various explanations for the conditions of the Big Bang, of the multiverse sword or the big bounce sword, or stories about what's happening in other universes or what universes existed before our own, et cetera, et cetera, are fundamentally unscientific. Because what the tools of science can do is study the material reality that we live in. And anything else is a story being told that may or may not be convincing, but it's not, it's not science, you know, and you cannot do the work that science wants to do in terms of quantification, prediction, experimentation, et cetera, for those theories. So, so as I say, a lot of science scientists recognize that. A lot of scientists recognize, you know, at the time of, not long after Darwin, you know, people thought that they had established what the sort of, you know, fundamental smallest unit of matter was in the atom. You know, then they did realize that they, that there existed these subatomic particles. So they drilled down, okay, now we know that there are these three types of particles that everything is made out of. Then they drill up underneath that and they get into quarks. And then people start to realize there doesn't seem to be an end to how small you can drill down. There doesn't seem to be a fundamental unit of measurement. And again, there's many people who would say that once you start talking about, you know, strings, super strings, you know, that are, that are below the level that we could potentially ever study, you're telling a story, you're not doing science, it could be more or less convincing. So I think none of that then turns you back to saying, therefore God must exist, by the way. But the point is, at minimum, we have to recognize the limits of what science can tell us about reality and do our best to practice science within those limits. And I should note that that's something that immanuel Kant said 250 years ago. Um, that's something that, from the beginning of the Enlightenment, from the beginning of the rise of modern science, as this incredibly powerful tool for studying reality, from the beginning of our era of, uh, really embracing reason as the sine qua non of what it meant to be a human who could understand the world. There have been people, Enlightenment thinkers themselves, not counter Enlightenment reactionaries, who have said at the same time it is important to put reason in its place. It is always important because as soon as we try to apply reason outside of the bounds of where reason can be applied, very strange things start to happen.

Speaker A: So in putting reason in its place, and when you look at your most recent book, why I'm not an Atheist, you've had a story, you've had a journey that you've been on, and at this stage of your life, you're writing a book about why you're not an atheist. And you also mentioned a minute ago that it doesn't necessarily lead to the discovery of God. So kind of take some time and walk us through your journey and how your story fits into this narrative.

Speaker B: Sure. My personal story is that, you know, I grew up in New York City in a, um, you know, devout Catholic family. I was an altar boy, I went to Catholic school, I was, you know, educated by Jesuit priests, all of that kind of thing. I, uh, had a couple of major personal events, including a cancer diagnosis at a quite young age that, that led to cracks in my faith and eventually led me. All of this is happening. I'm in my mid-40s now, so I graduated from college right around the time of 9, 11. This is all happening at the, the era of the new atheists. You know, it's a, it's a prime period for being a intellectual, uh, doubter, you know, and I embraced that spirit that I was going to figure things out for myself. Bertrand Russell, who wrote a book called why I'm Not a Christian, which is where my title is referring to, he spoke about looking the world frankly in the face. And that's what I said I'm going to do. I'm going to give up on these, you know, this wishful thinking, this tradition. I was raised in all of these myths, all of these bedtime stories we tell ourselves to get over the fear of death. And I'm just going to look at the world as it actually is. And I committed to doing that. And I still try very hard to do that. And a journey of that looking the world frankly in the face led me over the course of 20 plus years to think that when you looked at the world frankly, there was something looking back at you and eventually led me back to theistic belief and, and eventually back to being a practicing Catholic. But I can tell you about the earlier portions of the story is that once I decided that I needed to figure out, uh, the answers to these big questions that religion otherwise tried to answer, and I was going to do it without theistic belief, I started reading a lot of philosophy, a lot of modern secular philosophy, and I tried to sort of sort through the kinds of answers that modern, uh, humans have given themselves to these questions. And it was in large part through that reading that I came to understand that the answers were a lot more complex and more fraught really than the, the modern sort of skeptic, atheist, religious doubt, or what have you believe. So, for example, the idea that a figure like Kant, who was a chief Enlightenment figure, he was really as much engaged in the process of trying to limit the spheres of reason as he was engaged in the process of trying to free reason to do its work within that sphere. A person like David Hume, the great Scottish empiricist, who is a real favorite of Atheist thinkers that he. And, uh, he had an enormous influence on Kant because he really questioned the ability of reason to get us to some fundamental truth about reality. And he basically thought of reason as an instrument, as a tool for getting what we wanted out of life, but not as something that could get us to the. Again, to the capital T. Truth.

Speaker A: But let's stay with your journey for a second. You said you had a cancer diagnosis when you were younger. You've obviously, it sounds like, really wrestled with your fate. I came to you today and I said, well, listen, Christopher, I think it's wonderful you now believe in God, um, whatever that means, and you've come back to the Catholic Church. But I have a gay daughter, a gay son, or, you know, at the end of the day, you know, heaven. You really believe there's going to. There's a. I understand having faith that there's a heaven, but, but, you know, and, and this whole notion that there's black and white rules in the, in the Bible, whether it's the Christian Bible or the Jewish, that we're going to stone someone to death for violating the Sabbath. I mean, you came back to Catholicism. I mean, how, you know, how do you grapple with these issues? What, what do you say to that doubter?

Speaker B: Well, I have, uh. I say a few things to that doubter. The, the, the. The first thing is that I, I recognize all sorts of shortcomings in the Catholic Church as an institution. And I don't think being a, a member of the institution means that you think that institution is perfect. I mean, I think if that were the bar, then no one would be a member of any institution. Are, you know, these are institutions that are. That are run by fallible human beings inevitably. So, so I'll go further and say that I don't, I don't believe that the spirit of Christianity or of Catholicism is a spirit of saying that we. We know this or that for sure. Um, and in fact, what I said before about, you know, we see through a glass darkly, right. As I said, that comes from Christian scripture. But in fact, the Catholic Catechism speaks right up front before it gets into almost anything else, about our limited human capacities for understanding reality, for understanding God, and about an ongoing effort, human effort to get into a better and closer relationship with God, to understand what God wants from us, and speaks about the church as essentially as our best vehicle for getting there, but, you know, not as something that has absolutely answered all those questions for us. That's not. That is what many, uh, I know individual Catholics believe, as do many individuals who are part of any belief system. There are those who just feel absolutely certain this is right, this has all the answers. And then there are those who say, this is the best I've got. It's return to what I said at the beginning about all of us are dealing with approximations. And so that's the answer that I'd have. To me, the lesson, the message of Christianity is this. There is a certain order to the universe that we as human beings can see if we look honestly around us. And that that order is related to the fact that it is the product of a creative intelligence. There's however many hundred Jewish laws handed down, uh, to, um, the Jews of Jesus time. And Jesus is asked which are the greatest of these? And he says there are only two commandments that matter, which is to love God with all your heart and, um, love your neighbor as yourself. And to me, the message of Christianity is that the reason we're here, the reason this universe exists, is an act of love and creation. Right? There is a creator that loves us, that wants us to reciprocate that love, and also to love the rest of our creation. We are here to love each other, and we're here to love this creation that we've been put in. And part of loving something is wanting to know it, uh, wanting to understand it. So even something like this scientific project, to the extent that it is a project of trying to know reality, that is very consistent with what I understand as our purpose here when it comes to questions about sexual morality or about how you know what other people should or should not be doing with their bodies or with each other or whatever. Where I come from is a place of, I'm here to try and love and understand. And the other thing that I think that Christianity is supposed to teach you is that the extent that you're about having some standard up here and judging whether that standard is being met, your concern is whether you yourself are meeting that standard. It's not about whether anyone else is meeting that standard. Your obligation to others is to love them. Now, there may be times where what it means to love someone is to try. And if you think they're making a mistake that is hurtful to them to try and help them out of it. But it is not about judging any really, other than yourself.

Speaker A: So without disclosing too much, I don't think there's anything you said I disagree with. So we're on the same page here. Yeah, no, but it's. But I think for our Listeners. It's interesting because people do have such black and white reactions to religion. I think it's an important story for people to hear because mixing rationality with faith, I think is a dangerous thing. So, for instance, you know, there's a lot of people that use a rational approach to the Bible, which is it's literal. And if it's literal, that means in certain things that are said, that means, you know, if, uh, I am the way, meaning if you do not take Jesus Christ in as your savior, quote unquote, you do not get to go to heaven or again, go back to, you know, sexual morale or, you know, you know, the world was created in six days, right? If you're going to take the Bible literally, we got a problem. Like science tells you that the world was not created in six days. So, you know, and God rested on the seventh. So you obviously have wrestled with these issues. And when you have your dark night or your soul or otherwise, how do you, how do you wrestle with those rationalistic black and white interpretations of the Scriptures?

Speaker B: You mean, if someone else is questioning me and saying, why do you believe this or that? Or do you mean if I myself start, you know, them reading the Bible and saying, hold on, a lot of this stuff doesn't make sense.

Speaker A: Or, you know, for instance, as someone who's done a lot of Bible study, and I'm Jewish by faith, but I've studied the New Testament a lot. And Jesus, from my perspective, among other things, was an amazing rabbi, and it was a reformed M rabbi. He was trying to stand up to the evil of his day, so to speak, and the corruption in the church and in this society not, not due to some real, one of the challenges we see today. So, you know, I, I'm, I'm very sympathetic to what I call our Judeo Christian approaches to living, uh, a moral life. On the other hand, when I, when I study my scripture, for instance, I, I'm left with the fact that, like you said in Judaism, what does it mean to be Jewish? Rabbi Hillel said, you know, I'll tell you what it means to be Jewish. You know, I'll teach you the Torah while you're standing on one foot. Don't do to others what you'd find hateful to yourself. The rest is commentary. Now go out and study, right? So I, uh, mean, there's a huge overlap between love your neighbor as yourself and what I just said. So we're on the same page. The question is that same. Now go out and study, right? When you study the Bible Whether or not it's slavery or homosexuality or violating the Sabbath, I, I do believe if a student comes to you and says rabbi or minister or, you know, priest, you know, how. How do I deal with my wayward son or daughter? How do I deal with my gay brother? You know, there, there needs to be an acceptable, loving answer to that. And I think the church and the, and the, and the, you know, and the Orthodoxy, for instance, in the Jewish religion have really stumbled on that question.

Speaker B: I agree with you that they've stumbled on this question. I think one of the reasons why it's an interesting time to be an American Catholic, right, because we've got a Catholic pope and one who just spoke out very strongly against some really demonic stuff that our president was, has been saying in recent days. And Pope Leo was really issued a clear clarion moral call about threatening to end civilizations and what that means. Um, the US Bishops had taken, I think, the correct line about immigration policy, which has a lot to do with the fact that it's fine to say that you have to have a sensible immigration policy and that you have to have control of the borders, but immigration enforcement shouldn't be done in a vindictive, hateful way that is meant to scare people, that is meant to tear families apart, that is meant to cause human suffering, and that there's something fundamentally unchristian about that. So I think there are a lot of places where you can see very, very prominent Catholics speaking out, um, in ways that, to me, feel extremely consistent with the gospel injunctions to love. Then at the same time, you have, after, you know, arguably the, the most prominent American Catholic, but probably, I'd say after Pope Leo, the most prominent American Catholic is J.D. vance. Vance is not just supportive of his administration's immigration policies or his administration's, uh, policies about foreign aid that is helping to give people AIDS medicine in Africa or things like that. He's not just supportive of these policies, but he's actually using Christian philosophy to support them. And, you know, I think that I know which side I'm on. I'm on the side of the pope and I'm on the side of the bishops. It is at minimum, I think, that there have been sort of social questions that are both the right and the left make too much the focus of what, you know, religion is, quote, unquote about. And I, I will say personally, I go to. I go to Mass every Sunday and I go to Mass in, um, Brooklyn Heights. You know, it's a very sort of progressive neighborhood, and we got a church that reflects that. At the same time, I then go out to the east end of Long island over the summer and I go into a church that is, you know, fairly relatively conservative. I go all over the country and I go to. While I'm traveling, I go to math, because that's what you do if you're a Catholic. So I go to a lot of conservative parishes and progressive parishes. And one, not everyone knows that both of those things exist throughout the country. But in the conservative ones, most of the time, Mass is Mass and nobody gets up and gives a fire and brimstone sermon about why gays are going to hell. That's not what is going on in Catholic Mass. Each Sunday, you're reading the Gospel, you're participating in the Eucharist, you're involved in a sacrament. You're trying to be aligned with something much larger than yourself, in a community, with other people. In both the more conservative and the more progressive parishes, I have found that if there are going to be references to the current sort of social conditions, it is much more likely to be people talking about our need to care for the poor and people talking about our need to care for refugees and for the people among us who don't have a home. And like I said, that's not just because I'm going to the lefty parish in Brooklyn Heights. That's everywhere.

Speaker A: Uh, so staying with that more optimistic message, when you write about, and I think you have written about kind of politics and you write about the Democratic platform and where the Democrats are going, where do you think the Democrats are getting it right, and where do you think they're getting it wrong?

Speaker B: So I'm not primarily a political thinker, but I have thoughts on these things, as everyone does. And as I wrote in this recent article in compact, I think that the Democrats need to be much more alive, uh, to what is compelling about the, for lack of a better term, sort of post liberal diagnosis of our society. You know, when Patrick Dineen wrote his book, I think probably 10 years ago, it came out about the, about the failures of liberalism. Barack Obama blurbed, uh, it. You know, Obama's a serious guy, and he read this serious political thinker's critique of liberalism that talked about how. And by the way, I'm talking about small L liberalism. I'm not talking about being a sort of progressive, um, uh, Democrat. I'm talking about the world that values personal freedom and essentially the marketplace above other values. That is the dominant mode of our society that I think is embraced both by a lot of the right and historically by the sort of like market evangelist. Right. And also I think largely now by the left. You know, it used to be that there was a pretty robust portion of the left that was suspicious of the markets as the kind of driver of human good. That's what a lot of, for example, the sort of 60s counterculture was about. And I think what's happened is that as the left has come to find that in fact the market ideology is quite good for many left wing social goals, um, particularly having to do with identity politics. But, but you know, in very. This is not a critic, I don't say identity politics dismissively. I think that for example, equality between, between men and women, strides in that right were extremely, were helped to a great degree by market ideology. Why? Because it is economically valuable to get, you know, a, the other half of the population into the high end workforce. Because it is in fact the case that in a knowledge economy, right, women absolutely can succeed on the level of men and, and, and in many, many cases surpass them. And that if you free the old traditional restrictions, social restrictions, that, that's, that's going to be very good for women. So you know, there's people who kind of talk dismissively now about sort of like girl boss feminism or something like that, sort of corporatized feminism. Right. But in fact it has been a great boon, um, to, to women and to society as a whole, you know, and the same has been true for the success of a lot of, you know, marginalized racial groups, marginalized sexual groups. Right. The idea that, you know, old sort of like traditional ways of organizing things put limits on our personal autonomy. And the thing that ought to matter as a, as a fundamental goal is personal autonomy. You know, that has really been embraced by much of the left. It has also created for many, many people. And I don't mean that the introduction of women in work, of course, has created this. So just, just to be clear, but the, the valorization of personal autonomy above all other things has created a lot of social problems. The idea that all goods are market goods and that ultimately what matters is what gets settled out there in the marketplace has created a lot of social problems. It has created a lot of isolation. Right. It has created a lot of anxiety, it has created a lot of precarity. And historically, going back to the era of the Great Depression and moving forward, resisting that idea and trying to support people who are faced with that precarity has been a huge part of what the Democratic Party was about. And it feels to me like it is less so now. And one of the reasons that I think Democrats resist that is because it does involve talking in ways that make essentially value judgments that I think a lot of people on the left are not comfortable making.

Speaker A: I think it's keeping, as you said, trying to not make it overly political. I think black and white thinking is easier than really living with the, uh, the uncomfortable nature of paradox. And, you know, the. The fact is, you can say, you know, love your neighbor as yourself, okay, and you can. You can talk about mercy, but because mercy needs to be tempered with judgment, you can lead with the right hand of kindness, but you have to have some boundaries with the left hand. And. And I think as a society, we struggle with that.

Speaker B: I don't want to pretend that I have the absolute right answer to anything. However, it often seems to me that, uh, with a lot of what seem like the most intractable political questions, there actually are pretty common sensical middle ground, and it doesn't seem like there's any incentive for people to arrive at that middle ground. So Trump's immigration policy is deeply unpopular, and it should be. Sending masked thugs into American cities against the will of the local population and dragging people out and disappearing them is not something that we should allow to happen in this country. Without question. You can believe that and should believe that, while also believing, as you say, that it doesn't make sense for a host of reasons to have open borders. Um, and it seems like it would not be that difficult for some Democrats to just say, yeah, we're gonna. We think we should work on controlling the influx of immigrants in a way that we have done throughout most of this country's history. But for many reasons, we're not going to turn it to zero. Um, but we're gonna do a better job of enforcing the laws that are already on the books. But at the same time, we're gonna do it in a way that's driven by compassion. And, you know, if there was for many, many years in this country, an implicit sense that if you got here and found yourself a job and started being a productive member of society and followed the rules, you know, if that existed 20 years ago and people came here under that understanding and have now become part of their communities and they have children here, et cetera, um, that we're not going to start this process by going and tearing them out of their homes and dropping them to a country that they lived in until they were four. Um, but maybe how we are going to start it is we're going to do a better job of stopping the people who are coming in now. And we're going to make clear that that implicit sense that if you got here, you got to stay is not going to prevail anymore. I mean, that seems like a decent compromise.

Speaker A: When you look at media today and AI and algorithms, and you compare that to, for instance, the time when Walter Cronkite was on television and advertising was really designed to bring both Republicans and Democrats to watch the television show. So they wanted a neutral message, so to speak. How much of a role do you think media plays in these echo chambers and essentially creating this disincentive that you referred to to compromise?

Speaker B: I'm sure it plays an enormous part. And I think that, I mean, there's there, there is the, the sort of bubble effect that you're talking about. Even what, what used to be the mainstream is, is not anymore. Even the things that were supposed to be neutral have their sort of, you know, partisan, um, spin on things. But the thing that I think that has been most destructive has been the rise of social media, in my opinion. I mean, I just think that when I remember when Twitter started, the common sense response was, this is the dumbest thing I've ever seen. The idea that people are going to communicate to each other in whatever it was, what is the character limit? 26 characters. The idea that this is going to be our public square is just people sheeting off one sentence messages to each other is. It's completely ridiculous. And I think that we should get back some of that sense that it's just forget who owns it and how, what the algorithm is doing or whatever. It's just, that's not the way people are meant to be communicating with each other. And I think that, like, we allow ourselves to get used to certain things that, you know, there's an inflection point where there's still time to say, like, no, this is not what being a human is about. And it feels like we're at that point with AI right now where every company wants to make it seem to you like you can't do without this thing that you have been doing perfectly well without for your entire life. Because I'm not saying AI doesn't have its uses, right? But what the people who develop it obviously want is they want it to be much like they decided they wanted our phone to be. You know, something that we're just on all day, every day as a matter of course. And so they have to constantly teach us or show us why it's going to be so much Easier if you do it this way instead of that way. And we all find things right. It doesn't. It does. AI doesn't actually deliver us the results we wanted. We wind up doing more work than if we just figured it out for ourselves. It tells us something that isn't true. And so we actually have to, we have to talk ourselves into the idea that we need this thing, just as we had to talk ourselves into the idea that it would be a reasonable way for us to be communicating the way that social media works, you know, and then we're going to talk ourselves into it and then it's going to close up around us and we're not going to be able to even remember the time before it did everything for us. So I feel like we're at this point now where we still have an opening to resist and I just hope people will do.

Speaker A: I think that Jonathan Haidt's writings and uh, more and more the rules being passed to limit cell phone use in schools. I've heard the other day, in the same day, two people I'm very close to basically said that they need to limit their time on their phone. So I think just the fact that people are aware of this, people are much more aware of it than they were even a few years ago. I think we're headed in the right direction. Let me circle when you talk about the truth, whether or not we're lying to ourselves about the use of debt in the country or the stories we're telling ourselves about how these non banks are going to all be fine, even though, you know, they're limiting people's withdrawals and so forth. Do you have any perspective in terms of how institutions think and act when it comes to finance and how some of your studying and observations tie into that?

Speaker B: There's a great deal about, about finance, about the economic world, like everything else, like the whole scientific model of truth, right. Is that the truth kind of comes out in the aggregate, but what we're always actually concerned with is the individual case. You know, John Locke, you know, another of the, of the great early empiricists, spoke about the kind of truth that humans can have given our limit and we can't have certain metaphysical truth. And he said that instead we are consigned to live in the twilight of probability, right? And this has become the great, the great scientific belief that, you know, this is why science works in quantification, is that the truth is probabilistic rather than deterministic, right? And there are uses to this truth, right? But what the subjective, existential kind of perspective says is right, but what I care about is one of one, I care about what's going to happen to me in my case. And so to return to my cancer diagnosis, I'm being a little glib about it, but it's true, right? Someone gets a diagnosis and they get told your odds are 75%. But they want to know is, am I in the 25 or am I in the 75? And no one can actually tell them that. And I suspect that that is in part the challenge in the financial world, which is why, of course, people try and spread out their bets so they can get some of the power of probability. But on the human level, we're concerned with the one of one. We're concerned with what is actually going to happen in this case, not what is 75 or even 95% likely to.

Speaker A: Well, Christopher, this has been great.

Speaker B: It was a nice conversation. I enjoyed it. You're coming at it from a different perspective than a, a lot of people, and I enjoy that.

Speaker A: I enjoyed it as well.

Speaker B: I think you have, uh, a great openness. I'm often talking to people whose background is in, explicitly in religion or literature, or they come from the media, the world that I've worked in, and thinking about the way these ideas would then apply to something like private credit, for example.

Speaker A: I'd been a curious person all my life. And so whether or not it's starting out in big law or, you know, I remember when a friend of mine in high school was reading Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, I said, can I just get the Cliff Notes? You know, it took me until I was in my late 20s to really, uh, appreciate the brilliance of literature. And then, you know, I thought religion was the opiate of the masses till I was 39. And if you realize that there were religious thinkers that didn't see the world as a black and white way, and if you really study what Jesus said and you really, really focused and then come up with your own interpretations of these things, you could coexist in, in a world of religion. And so for me, you know, recognizing the beauty of philosophy and science, but also grappling with the, the ineffable, I, I was involved in an organization called the Gabor center, which was an interfaith organization run by two married Christian women. Their, their tagline was many paths, one truth. I love to wrestle with these questions. And you're, you're obviously a seeker, and I value your thought process and, and I, I look forward to staying in Touch and seeing Christopher. And you have a very famous name, Christopher. You know, where, Where. Where your journey takes you.

Speaker B: Speaking of names, I'll just say briefly. So my last name is Bea, which many, many people hear is Bear. And my twin brother and my father are both James Bayer. Interesting. And they're both lawyers. Um, I'm basically the only male in my family who's not from that world.

Speaker A: I started out in a big lie. I could not be doing what I'm doing now without that training. You know, I basically try to bring order to chaos. Meaning I do think talking about truth versus falsehood, I think that physics is physics. So, meaning there's a famous story in the Christian and Jewish Bible that said, uh, Joseph interpreted Pharaoh's dreams that we're going to save wheat in the good times and eat it in the bad times. Meaning, I believe he was a Keynesian economic, the expert who realized that you balance it. And when you break those rules, there came a Pharaoh that did not know Joseph. And you treat the Nile as an unlimited resource. It leads badly. So from my perspective, I, uh, really from a resurrection guy, you know, I look at the whole world being addicted to this idea of unlimited debt, and I think God will have the final word. And so I enjoy kind of being the person that talks about this because I do think we're going to go through a challenging period when we realize that we actually have to figure out a way to live with our means.

Speaker B: What is that going to mean? Hyperinflation?

Speaker A: Or going back to your point about searching for the truth? Going back to your point about 70. We only care about the one. Uh, all I can tell you is you go back to the story, you know, in the Christian, Jewish Bible about the 10 plagues. At what point, you know, does the system collapse? To me, the death of the firstborn is symbolic of when you no longer pass your traditions and your culture down to the next generation. Judeo Christian values are still being propagated. You're talking about love your neighbor as yourself. I'm not sure that Pharaoh's message, whatever it was about building pyramids and slavery is getting out there in the same way. So from my perspective, the death of the firstborn has not happened to the Christian world, where, you know, Jesus is still being talked to 2,000 years later. So I don't know how this ends. I think there has to be a combination of humility, like ultimately we're going to be humbled. I think the universe, God, whatever you want to call it, will have the final laugh when when we acquiesce and how we acquiesce, I don't know.

Speaker B: All right,

Speaker A: the Puck Venture Capital and Beyond is brought to you by CMEG Advisors. If you enjoyed the conversation today and haven't, uh, yet subscribed to our show, you can find us on YouTube, iTunes, Apple Podcasts and SoundCloud. Feel free to leave a review while you are there and m maybe even a five star rating. You can also follow us on TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube for updates, highlights and more content from our team. Thanks for listening. We'll be back soon with a new episode.