Ross Douthat on Why Religion Makes More Sense Than You Think

29:00But you are not supposed to reconstruction of it that makes me feel like I'm in control. But I don't think I am very much if at all. Don't you think you've maybe just sort of imbibed a bit too much of the sort of materialist spirit of the age? I don't even call it materialist. I want to give you credit. I think you write your own books. I think Tyler Cowan, you know, with some assistance obviously from, you know, angels on one shoulder, demons on the other, maybe some fairies thrown in, I think I think you, I want to give you credit for actual existence. I don't think it is, I don't think that this sort of theory of the mind as aggregation actually does justice to the direct experience of being a human being.

29:47But if there are many alien beings on other planets, as I would say now seems likely, whether or not they've ever come here. Does that make Jesus Christ less important? Why does it seem likely? We keep on discovering more planets. Yes. That appear possibly habitable. We don't know what's on them, but it's certainly more likely than if we were not discovering any such planets. So we should be raising our probability. It's a big place out there. I mean, I would be shocked if there was not other mindful life in the universe. I would also be somewhat surprised. I do think that the Fermi question still seems to hold, even given lots of life -friendly or seemingly life -friendly planets.

30:33It seems the silence of the cosmos seems quite odd. If at the very least there are lots of star -faring species out there capable of sending messages into the deep, you might think that we are among the first. in which case we seem fairly special, or you might think that there are just very, very few, in which case I think we seem fairly special again. I think it's unlikely. Would be my guess. They destroyed themselves and left no signals tracing their way through space. The speed of light is a tough one. Maybe we're somewhat early. I agree it's a puzzle. I don't find it insuperable. I mean, so just to go back to your question, And I mean, I think that the question for the Christian given the existence of other beings with our kind of consciousness in the galaxy would be, you know, what is what is there?

31:33What is there apparent relationship to God and yeah, just just to God, right? Because I mean, this is where the Christian doctrine of the fall is sort of useful, right? the presumption would have to be that either they had some kind of, you know, that there was some role for Jesus in their existence, and maybe we're the vehicle for that, you know, there are fun science fiction novels where the Jesuits send missionaries to other planets. I think you could imagine a scenario where the Catholic Church would very quickly try and recruit some missionaries to evangelize an alien species, or you could have the scenario that you get in Christian science fiction novelists.

32:17You get a little bit of it in Madeline Lengel, you get it in C .S. Lewis's The Space Trilogy, where there are other species in the universe that are made in the image of God maybe, and they have not fallen. And we have. We are alienated from God in some profound way that other species might not be. So those I think would be the two reasonable moves that a Christian might make confronted with some form of extraterrestrial life. I do think, though, again, that the silence that we are faced with suggests that something more is going on than just life is commonplace. It's all over and we haven't run into it yet.

33:01I think it either has to be quite rare or, you know, to be, I mean, in both the Lewis and the Lengel novels, there's a kind of supernatural blockade on planet Earth because we fell, right? Like, I mean, yeah, I mean, this is obviously what people, people who believe, people who believe that, I guess, UAPs, right, as we're now supposed to call them, the UFOs, people who believe that those are actual visitors from other worlds, they have to believe in a kind of, you know, non -supernatural natural version of that, right? They have to believe that there's some sort of like management of Earth's knowledge of the galaxy going on to explain why there are all these crafts zipping around, but we've never heard a radio signal from deep space.

33:43So you could imagine a kind of more supernaturalist version of that hypothesis, I suppose. And if you're weighing those probabilities that UAPs are alien drone probes, versus angels and demons, just what do you bring to bear on trying to figure that out? Because even I, I would say this, UAPs have increased my probability that there's a God, because there are not many explanations for them. There's China, there's Russia, there's Kraftoverrown, there's Allian Drone Probes, and there's what you could call broadly supernatural. Yeah. So there's like five explanations. Yep. And that's one of the five.

34:23Well, there's, yeah. So it's up my piece. I mean, the move that people make is to say that they're interdimensional. That they could be, this is sort of the, I don't know what that means. But I also don't know what that, I don't know how you distinguish that from sort of essentially super naturalist explanations. I mean, so my basic, if you had asked me, you know, five to ten years ago, my basic view about UFOs, I didn't have strong views about them. But I would have said that most of what I'd read in the literature about sort of personal encounters with supposed extraterrestrials seem to line up reasonably well with pre -modern accounts of encounters with angels, demons, and maybe especially fairies.

35:09This is an argument that the ufologist Jacques Vallet made early in the uf -o, many decades ago, that if you compare an account of an alien abduction to an Irishman's tale of being abducted by the unceiligcourt, there's a lot of interesting similarities. So, there are two conclusions you could draw from that. You could say, well, there's this kind of Jungian unconscious that human beings have that grants us these weird dreamlike experiences. And in modern times, we attribute them to aliens and we used to attribute them to fairies, or you could be more of a supernaturalist and say there are beings out there who like to, you know, pardon my language, fuck with us, right?

35:56And they do it in different ways, in different times and places. That seems to me to be the straightforward reading of the data on individual encounters, right? Abductions and counters, that stuff. I honestly don't know what to make of the craft zipping around stuff. And that's part of why it's interesting. I have difficulty fitting it into a sort of non -supernaturalist paradigm. I think you can, right? You can say the best argument would be these are extraterrestrial drones sent from deep space or from some observation base deep under the oceans, right? If we're going to get really, really kooky.

36:41And this is what you'd expect from an advanced civilization many light years away, they can't travel to every planet that has life on it. So they, you know, have some drones, keeping an eye on things. I guess you could make that argument. Then if you make that argument, then you sort of have to separate that from all the kind of paranormal UFO abduction stuff and say, Well, these are just separate things. One belongs to the realm of religious supernatural Jungian experience and one is literal aliens visiting us. I find that unsatisfying. I feel like they're probably, if they aren't Chinese drones, right?

37:16If they aren't sort of native Earth tech, I don't know if it's probabilistic reasoning or not, but my mind sort of wants there to be a connection between weird abduction stories and Navy pilot sightings. But I don't, I guess it's a case where I sort of, I'm, I find the subject quite interesting, but I don't want to make any kind of commitment because I think we lack, you know, we just conspicuously lack evidence. I mean, there is, I think there's a sort of, you know, a contingent of Christian and religious interpreters of this stuff who say, you know, look, it's probably demonic. It's basically how the old gods of paganism who are really demons get back in they pretend to be Instead of pretending to be angels of light.

38:06They pretend to be ets of light and so on You know if you had my friend Roger here on who's you know writes a lot about mystical issues and this lately started writing about UAPs He's very interested in that argument. I think were that the case? It would be quite striking and strange that there would be actual craft of some kind involved, certainly kind of departure from what we know about supernatural interventions otherwise, kind of an escalation that would be kind of strange. Yeah, I mean, it doesn't. And also, if I were a, let's say, a Syrian demi -demon trying to get worshippers back, Right, after all these thousands of years, I feel like this strategy might be, I don't understand the end game, I guess, of sending a bunch of crafts zipping around to freak out Navy pilots.

39:03I don't know how that, like, what's the plan there. So yeah, I'm trying to be, you know, resolutely open minded. In general, you wait personal testimony higher than I do. Let me see if you can talk me into it a bit. So, something is recorded in data sensors and confirmed across multiple sensors. Maybe I don't know what it is, but I believe there's something there. But if people say x, y, and z, there's all sorts of religions, neither you nor I would sign onto, and plenty of humans who will assert, insist, that there's direct evidence for that particular religion. So the story of Joseph Smith, the plates from LDS would be one example, but this plenty of religions that don't even exist anymore, where there is very particular stories that people have attested to.

39:55And we really do dismiss them in the numbers of the tens of millions or maybe even billions. So for willing to dismiss all those stories, I mean, isn't David Humerite and we should not dismiss the stories, but they're not going to budge out of a more common senseical worldview. Well, I guess that, yeah, I mean, I don't dismiss all of those stories. I guess that's part of my strong departure from human assumptions. I think that certainly there are fakes and frogs and charlatans in religion, and there are people who are just sincerely mistaken who think that they had a religious experience when they have a diagnosis of some form of mental illness or insanity.

40:46Right. At the same time, I think that there, I think that the wide range of attested spiritual, just frankly bizarre experiences that human beings have of which UFO encounters are a subset that again has familiar antecedents going back millennia. I think we should take those seriously and have a a theory of what they are that is more complex than fraud meets insanity meets delusion, right? And part of this is just, you know, knowing people who've had those kind of experiences, reading a lot about those kind of experiences, not just in my own tradition, but in other religious traditions. I think that they correspond to something real, even if the interpretation that people give to them is wrong or deluded or misguided.

41:43So I don't think that Joseph Smith was, in fact, chosen by God to restore the lost truths about Jesus Christ, polygamy, and the ancient civilizations of the New World. I don't think that's true. Do I think that Joseph Smith didn't have some kind of weird supernatural encounter? I'm less confident about saying that. And the same would go, I don't think that Muhammad is the seal of the prophets. Do I think that Muhammad either hallucinated or made it all up? Again, I'm certainly much less confident than you would be in saying that. It's almost in his Islamic doctrine. And I'm holding, right? There are these various tiers of prophets and they're imperfectly right, but they're getting at the divine.

42:30Yes, I think any coherent theory of supernatural experience, given what you can encounter just by reading William James, has to say either there's infinite realms of deception out there. This is something that some religious believers would say. There's one subset of totally authentic, trustworthy religious experiences, and then there's vast realm where it's all demonic deception. Or you have to say that there's just a range of ways in which people encounter God in the supernatural that do get filtered through sort of cultural assumptions and through imperfect, I want to say imperfect prophets, let's just say imperfect human beings.

43:19And that helps yield the diversity of religions in the world today. But you can also see patterns in those things, like near death experiences. The range, there is cross -cultural variation in near death experiences. If you have a near death experience as a Tibetan Buddhist, you are more likely to see the Buddha. If you have a near death experience as a Catholic, you're more likely to maybe see an archangel or a Catholic saint or something. But at the same time, there are some pretty clear commonalities to suggest that people in Tibet and people in Indiana are having the same kind of experience when they die and are resuscitated and report, the lights, the tunnel, all the strange things associated with those experiences.

44:07So, yeah, I think there's a challenge here, obviously, for any kind of dogmatic religion, right? You do have to figure out, like, okay, why is there this consistency, but also this variation. But there's also a challenge for the humans to say, well, we're just writing off this fairly consistent cross -cultural realm of human experience because it's all supposed to be myth and hallucination. I mean, the people who have these experiences are not generally the kinds of people who you would describe as prone to hallucination and insanity. either are of course cases, but that's not sort of the norm.

44:50And the other thing, sorry, I'm just going on a bit, right, on the humian point, right? Like if you go back and read Hume, and he doesn't exactly say this, but you eat. You really have the strong impression that Hume thinks that once you get rid of established religious authorities and sort of the universal teachings of antique stories from the Bible, that a big swath of supernatural stuff will just sort of go away. Now he says, you know, human's still. And that's wrong, right? Human still have this propensity to the marvelous, I think that's the phrase he uses. I mean, I don't think he'd be surprised by some persistence.

45:29But I think the original humian theory is, most people believe in the supernatural because someone has taught them about it at church and they're these legends handed down from misty antiquity. And that's, I think we just know that that's not true. That's not what's going on. And that's, I think, one of the multiple places where atheists, skeptics and materialists have some sort of prior updating to do about what we've learned over the last 200 years about what life is like under allegedly disenchanted conditions. But doesn't it worry you that for all of these instances of the supernatural, there's never enough evidence accumulated to convince actual scientists?

46:09No one's captured an elf, right? But as far as I know. And you could switch the topic to some other instance of the supernatural, but there's plenty of testimony of elves. Yeah, I mean, I guess I would, I worry though a little about, I mean, the assumption, the assumption of supernatural experience, I would say, is that there's, let's say, Let's say there are two ways in which it could manifest itself, just to massively simplify it. You could say it manifests itself through some kind of reaching in where a higher power, God, angel, demon, whatever is sort of operating in human reality, or you could say it relates to some sort of native gift, right?

47:00The idea that some people have psychic powers, right? And so on. In the first case, you are pretty clearly dealing with, you know, sort of, wills and intentions and intentionality and choices that are not, you know, that are essentially the equivalent of human will and intentionality and choices and so on. Right? And so, saying like, well, we should be able to, you know, consistently predict when someone will be possessed by a demon or something, and under the right laboratory conditions, it's like saying, well, we should consistently predict when two people are gonna fall in love under the right laboratory conditions.

47:38I don't think that's, I mean, again, the hardest core materialist might say, eventually, we should, right? We should be able to, you know, see what's happening in their brains, like these two people are gonna fall in love, but in practical terms, right? Science hits a limit when he, certain kinds of human agency enter the picture. And I don't see why it wouldn't hit a similar limit. I don't see why you would imagine that you could devise a laboratory system for reliably conjuring the supernatural. On the second case, I have a conjure it, but there's no way to measure it reliably. What do you mean by?

48:13I mean, whatever it would take, the editors of science and nature, whoever they may be, I suspect they don't believe in what you believe in. Whatever it would take to convince them. So we have no tools that will bring them along. It's, at some odd margin of being quite non -legible. It's that way on purpose to test us or it just turned out that way or it seems like a weird, I mean, I think it has to be, I think it has to be that way on purpose in order for the sort of basic coherence of physical existence to obtain, right? Like I think actually the sort of scientist's point originally that you You can't do science if an angel is always, you know, if you can always assert that an angel is just responsible for moving a planet around.

48:58I think that is a decent enough explanation of why, you know, you wouldn't, you know, you wouldn't sort of expect sort of constant predictable operation of supernatural forces in the world. I am also though, I mean, I think that there are, there are also reasons to think that, you know, I mean, there are a lot of, for instance, with psychic phenomena, right? Like this has been subject to thanks in part to, like the CIA's interest in it, right? This has been subject to a lot of quasi -scientific scrutiny over long periods of time. And you do have, you can find people who have done studies that technically stand up to the rigors of scientific expectations that seem to prove the existence of some kind of size, some kind of paranormal ability.

49:57But then you enter into the replication crisis, right? And you have, you have, you know, competing studies and recreations of those studies. But I don't want to say, I don't want to rule out, in fact, the possibility that if you, you know, if sort of more scientists set aside their materialist presumptions, that you wouldn't be able to get better data about, but I think it would have to be data about characteristics of human beings, right, rather than characteristics of angels and demons. I think the latter is sort of inherently inaccessible to the tools that we use from modern science, whereas I do think it's reasonable to say if people are psychic, maybe we should be able to design a set of experiments that offers clearer indications in that direction.

50:51I am, though, also, but when you read, I quote Freeman Dyson, I think, in the book, Maverick, Pauli Math, scientific genius, right? And he was a believer in psychic phenomena. And his argument was basically that if you read about the cases where people have these kinds of experiences, they're similar to cases of bursts of artistic creativity, or things again that it's very hard to predict and measure scientifically. They happen under periods of great physical or personal duress. They happen around the deaths of a loved one. They happen in inherently eccentric circumstances seem to, again, if these capacities existed, be the things that generated those capacities, which, again, creates some problems for laboratory measurement.

51:49I would say. This gets back to my interaction set of worries. So people report seeing and hearing angels and demons, right? But there's not an MP3 file or a photo where you would, oh, here we go. And that's very odd to me. It's not logically possible. It just seems highly unlikely. Well, I mean, there are... I mean, there... I mean, what... I guess what kind of... None of them seem to have failed at. Would convince you. Well, I mean, you know, Catholics always go for this one. So you know... I can hear Winston Churchill on YouTube, right? There's, right, well, you can, you know, you can, there's the, you know, miracle of the sun, the Fatima and early part of the 20th century did happen in front of a large number of witnesses.

52:31There are, you know, powerful newspaper accounts, I think, including in the New York Times. I mean, there's a reason that it's been hotly debated ever since. But it was, whatever it was, it was something that clearly had there been video cameras there. Something would have been perceived, right? Right. There's a similar case in Egypt involving an apparition of the Virgin Mary where there's footage and so on. But what would be, I guess, convincing to you, right? If I presented you, if I presented you tomorrow with a video of the Archangel Michael, walking through the halls of Torchemason, wielding a sword, you would assume that it was AI generated, right?

53:10At this point. Well, I would forget to someone and I could find out. Well, it's not, but at some point soon you won't be able to find out. But if you're right, if you're right about the progress, if you're right about the progress of AI, but that is not one to date Makes me much more skeptical Right, but they're Right, I mean You want You want God to man and you want me, but you want to produce a bull form that can be verified It just seems odd that it never turns out that way Yeah, I mean did you read Carlos Ayers book they flew no? Okay? It's worth reading, I would say, is a book about levitation.

53:49The 1500s and 1600s, sort of Reformation and Counter -Reformation era levitation by various saints. And, yeah, I'd be curious what you think about that book. There were no cameras, obviously, in the early 1600s. Air's argument is that by any normal, evidentiary standard in terms of collective witnesses and consistencies of witnesses and so on, these stories of levitation would seem to pass muster. So you have to be operating there in the realm, not just of personal delusion, but a kind of mass delusion. In the contemporary world, yeah, there hasn't been a claim of levitation since in the Catholic Church, since I believe a nun who is involved with the French resistance in 1930s and 40s, and there was photography then, so it's fair to say, you know, shouldn't we have a photograph?

54:45However, if I presented you with a photograph from the 1940s of the Levitating Non, I don't think you'd be convinced of it, right? Well, I would have people look into it for me. Right. Yeah. Right. But I mean, that's, you know, it would be grainy and so on, right? I mean, you want video... The best, you want the best... The best, you want the best video. Yeah. I mean, I don't think that's... I don't think for the more extreme forms of supernaturism, that's completely unfair request, but we'll see what we get over the next 50 to 100 years. I mean, you've already updated your priors about UFOs based on video evidence.

55:21Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, we'll end my priors on God for a minute. All right, so we'll come back to the video. I'm not in touch with the video. I think we can revisit the video evidence question. We only have a rather short number of decades of widely available video technology. So I think just general, which also has happened to be a period of sort of, you know, peak erud secularism. So I think I want to say that I think generalizing from that to a universal point that you could never have video evidence is maybe a little bit of a leap and we should give it a few more decades and see what surfaces.

55:58What do you think of Peter Tiel's fascination with the Antichrist? I think Peter is more apocalyptic. Then you are. Then I am. Not enough intermediaries in history. So all the stakes are on the table at once. I think it's more that the threat of the anti, like, I mean, he, you know, I think he's going to maybe elaborate his theories of the Antichrist at some point in the future. On video. On video, most likely, yes. And I think that the, you know, what we've seen so far, I would say, in the 21st century, I mean, take the Antichrist to be some sort of comprehensive global rule by a singular power dedicated to sort of a false view of reality.

56:45I don't know if that's how he defined it, but let's say I would that might be how I'd define it. I think we've tended to see sort of brief flares of forces and powers that sort of resemble that, but then quickly collapse under pressure from competing forces, other forces and so on. So in 2008, Barack Obama was for six months the most popular man in the world, not just in the US. He could have been elected president of the world. So you could say, well, in that moment you could see how one person, one incredibly charismatic individual could dominate the world in a mass media age. But six months into his presidency, Obama was back to being a normal politician with normal enemies, totally unpopular in various ways and so on.

57:32Or again, to take an example that I'm sure, I know that Peter's been very concerned about. Like the alignment of big tech companies with control over the internet with sort of woke ideology and its hostility to free speech and its sort of ideological fantasies, right? You can say, okay, that's not an individual, but it's a system, a system of interlocking directorates, a cathedral, the Yarvan phrase, from which we can't escape. But it kind of seems like we can't escape from that right now. The rule of the true rule of the woke cathedral where no descent was broke. What did last for? Six years?

58:18Yeah, and Donald Trump was president for some of those years. So I think that to be, I think to be a kind of an anti -Christ fear, you need to fear some power not yet fully in evidence, and that power, if you want to be non -supernatural, could be whatever, the machine god view of AI, right? I think if you take a kind of maximalist, duma view of of strong AI, then that's effectively a theory of the Antichrist. Or you could go back to our early discussion about the Sumerian gods returning and using the guys of aliens or something, that to enthrall us all. That could be a theory of the Antichrist.

59:06But those are theories of things not in evidence to me in the year of our Lord 2025. So I worry less about the Antichrist today than I did at various points recently. Should Peter just be an Opus Day Catholic? He's right leaning. Peter, Peter shouldn't quite... Peter should be a Catholic. I don't know if he should join Opus Day. I think it's okay. I mean, I'm not in Opus Day. I think it's okay to be a normal Catholic, right? I think, you know, I'm... Are they not normal Catholics? Well, one of the, well, one of the, I may have said this to you before, but one of the curious things about being a conservative Catholic who writes for New York Times, right, is that, you know, people have an idea that, you know, that you are the most, you know, intense, intense Catholic who ever lived or something like that, right?

59:59Which of course, you know, ultimately, you should be, we should all, you know, be seeking to be saints and so on. But in practice, I mean, you know, I'm trying to go to Mass on Sundays. I try to go to confession, right? I try and, you know, sort of try and lead a serious Catholic life, but I'm not, you know, I'm not, I think it's possible to have that be or destination rather than saying, okay, you know, you need, you know, this more intense order, this, you know, this more intense and subculture or anything, anything like that, right? So I think it's sufficient to say, yeah, you know, Peter should convert to Catholicism and attend masks on Sundays and holy days of obligation and you know, go to confession, I think that's enough.

1:00:49Catholicism in Mexico is pretty friendly to this idea of intermediaries, but in the United States it's pretty suspicious. Does that make you uncomfortable being an American Catholic? There's other ways you could be a Catholic, But you strike me actually is not that much of an American Catholic. Well, I don't doubt your sincerity in your state of use. No, but see, the same not to fit. Well, the thing is, I'm interested in the intermediaries as a, I guess you could say, would be analyst of what is actually going on in reality. I'm interested in what is going on in reality. I think these intermediary spiritual experiences are part of reality and they're interesting and they have a place in any argument for why one should be religious.

1:01:32In my everyday life, I'm not like, you know, I'm not out there performing exorcisms, right? I don't take ayahuasca. I think there's a prerent interest in intermediary spiritual powers that is forbidden to Christian, certainly to Catholics. You're not supposed to be trying to contact the spirits of the dead or doing divination or these kind of things. And so I feel like I'm comfortable enough. I mean, I think you could say that maybe, well one, I think Mexican Catholicism kind of is part of American Catholicism now to some degree, right? But I think it's okay to say Mexican Catholicism maybe captures the totality of existence more completely than suburban, suburban American Catholicism without necessarily wanting to spend all of your time in that zone.

1:02:33And especially because that zone, the Mexican example is actually a good example of where you would say that temptations come in, right? Because Mexico has a whole zone of quasi -catholic, pericatholic, folk religion, right? Where you're attending mass, but you're also making deals with Santa Muerte, right? and you know, you'll talk to priests who work in that territory who will say that they feel like their parishioners are sort of, you know, you know, yeah, going to mass one moment and making deals with minor demons the next and that's not what you're supposed to do at all. Does the ex -cathedra doctrine make sense to you?

1:03:12Concerning the Pope. I would say I have more questions about the nature and limits of people authority today than I did 10 or 15 years ago before the age of Pope Francis. I think it makes sense that if there is a God and if the second person of the Trinity came to earth to suffer and die for your sins in mine and if you know if there was a church established that was supposed to carry the you know carry that revelation and forward throughout history that that institution we would be protected in some way from the most serious forms of error. So in that sense, yes, some version of infallibility makes sense to me.

1:03:57I think the parameters of what could and couldn't be considered infallible are a little bit shaky. So maybe the Pope shouldn't get to decide when he's speaking ex -cathed. Well, the Pope, yeah, I mean, it's not, well, this is the thing, right there. Again, the Francis era has raised all of these debates. Just as Protestants run into difficulty arguing about what the authority of Scripture actually delivers, Catholics run into difficulty arguing about where the specific lines are of when and when not the Pope is speaking infallibly. I think I'm, I'd say, you know, when the Pope, when the Pope defines a dogma of the church infallibly, like the dogma of the immaculate conception or something like that, I think that has a useful clarity.

1:04:49I think on questions of morality, yeah, the historical record gets a little murkier. What have been the inspirations behind your fantasy novel online and free, right? The Falcon's children. Yes, online, serialized on Substack. Free for now, though, once I get through two -thirds of it, I think I need to pay wall and see how many people are actually interested in. Hold the interesting back. That's right. Hold the throng's back. I mean, it's a combination of things. First, I was a sort of Tolkien and Subtolking nerd in high school. that one of the lines is that people either become a conservative by reading Atlas shrugged first or by reading Lord of the Rings first.

1:05:36Sometimes I was Lord of the Rings. So I always liked fantasy as a genre just as a reader and something to play around in. So I've always I wrote a very bad fantasy novel in high school and then I started another one in my 20s and abandoned it. And then when I was ill with Lyme disease for a while, over, well, now I guess it was four or five years ago, and I did this. I sort of went back to that novel. One of the things about at least the kind of illness I had was that, you know, it was a very physicalized illness in which my consciousness to, you know, my consciousness felt sort of, you know, somewhat imprisoned in my body and I was sort of looking for things that my consciousness could do while feeling imprisoned and sort of trying to do writing fiction again seemed like one of them so I sort of went I went back to it and took the stuff I had from my 20s and worked through it again and then I have various sort of high -flown theories about why fantasy is an interesting genre that connect to many of the things we've been talking about here that you fantasy sort of occupies.

1:06:47It's very interested in the transition from an enchanted world to a disenchanted world, right, from pre -modernity into modernity. And this is true. This is as true of George R .R. Martin's novels as it is of Tolkien, right? This is sort of a recurring question that fantasy is navigating is, you know, has magic disappeared, is magic coming back, is it about to disappear these kind of things. So I think that sort of that aspect of fantasy is timely for our psychedelic and UFO haunted moment. And finally, in terms of actually publishing it, obviously I, you know, my intention was to write it and sell the rights to HBO and retire from newspaper column writing and provide for all of my many children that way.

1:07:36That has not happened. But I I decided to put it out there in part. You have this, it's you, right? You have the line about, you know, you should be writing for the AI, right? For the, you know, you want your, if so much of the future is going to be, maybe this isn't how you'd put it, but so much of the future is going to be, you know, AI reading the internet and doing things with the internet, you want to put your work out there. When you say things like that, I think to myself, you know, that, that might be true of my columns, maybe I'm writing my columns for the AI, but I have sort of a different view with fiction and creativity, which is that I was like, well, I don't fully believe that AI is going to be capable of human level creative writing, but on the off chance that it is, I'd like to get my own writing out there before that moment arrives.

1:08:27It's capable of some kind. finishing a song of ice and fire to the satisfaction of George R .R. Martin's fans, not yet. Right. If it will be, and then at some future point, the world will be absolutely flooded with works of art that have no actual human consciousness behind them. And I think works of art that have a human consciousness behind them are inherently better, no matter what our descendants might think about this subject. So I thought since I have this novel written, I I should put it into the world. So, you know, without an HBO serialization deal, that is what I'm doing. My readers wanted me to ask you, how's your health going?

1:09:14I mean, it's much, much, much better than how it was when I was at my worst. You know, you reach a certain point with recovery from a chronic illness where you're always telling people, you're 90 % or 92 % right without sort of, you know, it's sort of asymptotic to recovery. You're always sort of approaching 100%. and never quite getting there. But I feel like I am still making progress towards full health. And in practice, what tends to happen is that I feel about 97 % well until I get some other illness. And then some of my old symptoms come back. And I slip back. And unfortunately, we have a lot of illnesses that run through our house because we have a lot of kids.

1:09:59So I get, I slip back a fair amount. but which is to say there's still something in my system that my body has mostly suppressed, but that recurs. But generally, I'm, yeah, I'm in obviously a much better place than I was at my worst and also a better place than I was when I finished the book about having Lyme disease. Last two questions. First, your father wrote a poem about you. It's called The Hold. It's about you as a kid. Do you like it? I love all of my father's poetry. My father has a new book of poetry coming out in fact in just a few months. Before the last question, just to again reiterate the new Ross -Douthet book, Believe, why everyone should be religious, excellent, great, wonderful book.

1:10:43I very much enjoyed reading it, and once I could, I read it right away. Last question, what will you do next? In part, it probably depends on, you know, sort of internal questions at the times and playing around with different day job possibilities. I think one interesting question raised by the age of the internet is not just whether we're transitioning to a future where AI, we're just writing for the AI's, but also the shift from the written word back to oral culture in different ways. So we have a podcast at the times I'm, I prefer the written word to oral culture. I prefer reading greatly to listening to podcasts.

1:11:28I read transcripts of your podcast. So do I. Rather than listening to them. But I'm trying to accept the reality that ours is going to be a more oral culture. I'm doing my sub -stack of the fantasy novel. I'm reading the chapters. I'm not just publishing them. So I'm trying to think about that zone. If I acquired a really large number of readers for the fantasy novel, I would just go ahead and straightforwardly write the sequel. I think that there's also a, it might not be a book, but a project to be written that's a bit different from the sort of telian anti -Christ view of our future. And that's a bit more optimistic, but that treats the current moment as a kind of kind of bottleneck in a way.

1:12:14As you know, I'm somewhat obsessed with demographic decline and collapsing birth rates and so on, but I think it's interesting to think about 21st century culture, internet culture in particular as a culture that's going to kill off a lot of, you know, not just if long, long standing institutions, maybe entire countries may simply disappear, but other forms and other forces are going to come through the bottleneck and create whatever world exists on the far side. So that's, yeah, that's an interesting question too. But I'm also sort of looking forward to having, you know, in the wake of this book some more straightforward arguments about why my friends should practice a religion.

1:12:58Ross, thank you very much. Thank you Tyler. It was a pleasure, as always, and I'll work on the, you know, video evidence.

1:13:08Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm Attyler Cowan, and the show is At Cowan Convos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.