268: Rogan’s Christian President

Summary

Conspirituality Podcast Episode 268: Rogan’s Christian President

Introduction and Media Landscape

The episode begins with the hosts, Derek Barris, Matthew Remsky, and Julian Walker, delving into the current state of mainstream media and its challenges. Kristen Bell outlines the recent cancellation of Stephen Colbert's Late Show, attributing it to the looming $8 billion merger between CBS's parent company, Paramount, and Skydance Media. Bell notes, “[...] this merger will create a behemoth worth $28 billion” (04:15), highlighting concerns about media consolidation and the potential suppression of diverse voices.

Derek Barris emphasizes the alarming trend of local journalism being severely underfunded, pointing out, “some of our local affiliates here get up to 90% of their funding from NPR or PBS” (03:21). This underfunding threatens the sustainability of local news outlets crucial for informed communities.

Bari Weiss and Media Manipulation

The discussion shifts to Bari Weiss, a prominent figure in the media landscape, whose trajectory the hosts scrutinize. Kristen Bell describes Weiss’s rise from a Substack blog to founding The Free Press, seeking a valuation of up to $250 million (05:58). The hosts express skepticism about Weiss’s independence, suggesting that her substantial funding from conservative and libertarian investors like Marc Andreessen and Paul Marshall may influence her editorial stance. Bell asserts, “the very accusations of audience capture ideological bias and collaborating on censorship that Weiss and her outfit, cosplayed as opposing, are now openly for sale to the highest bidder” (16:03).

Derek Barris adds, “she is going to be beholden to whoever is writing those checks” (08:41), underscoring the potential conflict between financial backing and editorial independence. The conversation underscores the strategic alliances formed between media figures and oligarchs, raising concerns about the integrity and objectivity of independent media voices.

RFK Jr. and Conspiracy Theories

The episode also touches upon Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.) and his controversial stance on vaccines and public health. Kristen Bell highlights a lawsuit filed by Children's Health Defense against RFK Jr., accusing him of failing to establish a task force for safer childhood vaccines (26:04). The hosts critique this move as a tactic to further distrust in vaccines, with Derek Barris noting, “Kennedy has never seemed to want to answer things he doesn't want to address” (28:19). This aligns with a broader pattern of leveraging legal actions to advance anti-vaccine narratives, exacerbating public health challenges.

Matthew Remsky criticizes the lawsuit, stating, “it looks like a way to give political cover to something the Secretary may want to do anyway” (29:03), suggesting that the lawsuit may be more about political maneuvering than genuine concern for vaccine safety.

James Talarico: Rogan’s Christian President

A significant portion of the episode focuses on James Talarico, a 36-year-old Texas state representative and Presbyterian pastor, who recently appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast. The hosts explore Talarico’s influence and the implications of his dual role as a legislator and religious leader.

Talarico's Sermons and Theology

James Talarico is portrayed as a charismatic figure challenging Christian nationalism. In his sermons, Talarico emphasizes the importance of consent and critiques the misuse of religious authority in politics. At 42:35, Talarico states:

“There is a cancer on our religion. Until we confess the sin that is Christian nationalism and exorcise it from our churches, our religion can do a lot more damage than a six pack of Lone Star.”

This statement sets the tone for his advocacy against intertwining religion with political power. The hosts commend his eloquence and passion, noting, “[...] his delivery in general in these sermons is very powerful” (41:51).

Appearance on Joe Rogan

During his appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Talarico made a compelling case for running for president, which Rogan endorsed by saying, “you should run for president” (38:25). The hosts analyze this endorsement, suggesting that Rogan’s platforming of Talarico signals a shift towards integrating progressive Christian values into mainstream politics.

Kristen Bell reflects on the potential impact of such figures, stating, “If you want to know who’s going to break that [cognitive dissonance],” referring to Christians grappling with reconciling faith and modern societal values (47:16).

Impact and Implications

The hosts discuss the broader implications of Talarico’s rise. Derek Barris warns, “This means that conspiracy theories, anti woke talking points, pseudoscience peddlers, Christian nationalists and other reactionary voices at the heart of dismantling our democracy right now will continue to be legitimized” (17:48). They express concern that Talarico’s theological arguments might blend religious authority with legislative power, potentially undermining the separation of church and state.

Matthew Remsky, however, presents a more nuanced view, acknowledging Talarico’s progressive legislative efforts while critiquing his theological justifications. Remsky notes Talarico’s active engagement in legislative reform, such as pushing for school reform and banning reality TV policing, suggesting that his political actions align with his sermons against Christian nationalism.

Theological Debates and Criticisms

A heated debate unfolds among the hosts regarding Talarico’s use of biblical narratives to justify pro-choice politics. Kristen Bell criticizes Talarico’s approach, arguing that he’s “shoehorning pro Choice politics into what? The Holy Spirit asking the Virgin Mary's consent for the immaculate conception of Jesus” (57:28). Derek Barris and Dax Shepard engage in a back-and-forth, debating whether Talarico appropriately contextualizes biblical metaphors within modern political discourse.

Dax Shepard contends that Talarico is engaging in a “theological formation” aimed at ministerial and legislative training, emphasizing that his arguments are rooted in liberative theology rather than authoritarian religious dogma. Conversely, Derek Barris insists that Talarico’s presentation remains grounded in literal metaphysics, undermining purely metaphorical interpretations (60:25).

Concluding Insights and Analysis

As the episode draws to a close, the hosts reflect on the complexities of integrating religious beliefs with political action. They acknowledge Talarico’s potential as a progressive force within the Christian community while maintaining caution about the dangers of religious authority influencing legislative processes.

Derek Barris summarizes the crux of the issue:

“He is not doing what you think he's doing. [...] He is putting God in a role as if it's something real. [...] he is putting God in a role as if it's something real” (62:47).

Kristen Bell echoes the sentiment, emphasizing the importance of separating religious metaphysics from political morality to prevent compromised governance based on theological interpretations.

Notable Quotes

• Kristen Bell on media consolidation:

  “This merger will create a behemoth worth $28 billion” (04:15).

• Derek Barris on local journalism funding:

  “some of our local affiliates here get up to 90% of their funding from NPR or PBS” (03:21).

• Bari Weiss’s influence:

  “the very accusations of audience capture ideological bias and collaborating on censorship that Weiss and her outfit, cosplayed as opposing, are now openly for sale to the highest bidder” (16:03).

• James Talarico’s stance on Christian nationalism:

  “There is nothing Christian about Christian nationalism. It is the worship of power, social power, economic power, political power in the name of Christ” (42:35).

• Talarico on consent in creation:

  “Creation has to be done with consent. You cannot force someone to create. Creation is one of the most sacred acts that we engage in as human beings.” (57:10).

Conclusion

In this episode, "Conspirituality" navigates the intricate web of media consolidation, the rise of influential media figures like Bari Weiss, and the emergence of religiously motivated political leaders like James Talarico. The hosts critically examine how conspiracy theories and spiritual ideologies intertwine, potentially undermining public health and democratic principles. Through nuanced discussions and insightful critiques, the episode underscores the importance of safeguarding independent journalism and maintaining a clear separation between religion and politics to preserve societal well-being.

Transcript

[Kristen Bell]

Hi, I'm Kristen Bell and if you know my husband Dax, then you also.

[Dax Shepard]

Know he loves shopping for a car. Selling a car?

[Kristen Bell]

Not so much. We're really doing this, huh? Thankfully Carvana makes it easy. Answer a few questions, put in your van or license and done. We sold ours in minutes this morning.

[Dax Shepard]

And they'll come pick it up and.

[Kristen Bell]

Pay us this afternoon. Bye bye Truckee. Of course we kept the favorite hello other Truckee. Sell your car with Carvana today. Terms and conditions apply.

[Derek Barris]

Hey everyone. Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience and authoritarian extremism. I'm Derek Barris.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm Matthew Remsky.

[Kristen Bell]

I'm Julian Walker.

[Derek Barris]

You can find us on Instagram and threads inspiritualitypod. We are also all individually on Blue Sky. You can access all of our episodes ad free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on [e-mail] conspirituality. You can also access our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions if you're on that platform. As independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.

[Kristen Bell]

Conspirituality268 Rogan's Christian President we live in a time of mercurial brave contrarians who but time itself can say which are the heroes and which are the villains. Take RFK Jr. The Camelot born Democrat and erstwhile environmental lawyer who survived heroin addiction only to become the patron saint of wellness grifters and anti vax paranoia. Then there's Barry Weiss, the plucky journalist who survived anti Zionist professors at Columbia and then fled the New York Times to take a stand free speech in her unbiased independent grassroots newsletter only to end up knee deep in IOUs to oligarchs and carrying water for Trump and conservative Christian values. But all is not lost out of the haze of COVID and Maga Epstein and ice, Fake news and the death of democracy. A strange new development. Joe Rogan hosts a 36 year old Texas state representative and Presbyterian pastor in trading who's tearing up the State House with his sermons and legislative counterattacks against Christian nationalism. What do you know? Rogan tells him to run for president. Today we catch up with all three of these figures. CBS's recent cancellation of Stephen Colbert's Late show has gotten a lot of coverage. It's another worrying addition to the chilling effect on left of center media, along with the PBS and NPR loss of government funding in sweeping budget cuts. And I should say here, NPR receives only 1% of its budget from the government. They otherwise rely on listener donations. PBS receives 15%. But the local member stations is really what's going to be hit hard by this in the smaller markets because they rely much more heavily on that government money.

[Derek Barris]

I was just reading Axios this morning. I get the Axios Portland daily newsletter and it turns out that some of our local affiliates here get up to 90% of their funding from NPR or PBS. So that means we are looking at even more gutting of local journalism. And that's already a really big problem here and across the nation.

[Kristen Bell]

Now, the Late show decision happened in the shadow of an $8 billion merger being attempted between CBS's parent company Paramount, and another company called Skydance Media. That merger was actually approved by the FCC on Monday, yesterday, as we were recording, and it will create a behemoth worth $28 billion. Colbert, a frequent critic and lampooner of Trump, had recently bemoaned Paramount settling a ludicrous $16 million lawsuit filed by Trump against CBS based on untrue claims that 60 Minutes had deceptively edited their interview with Kamala Harris before the election last year.

[Derek Barris]

Bemoaned is one way to put it. I mean, he is roast on a daily basis on the show. It's, it's tremendous. But this really does set a dangerous precedent because what 60 Minutes had done was edited an interview. That's it. They just edited an interview like we do on this show, like every credible media organization has to do. Both to take out a lot of the banter and filler words and all of that, especially when at the higher level of media, like something like legacy, like 60 Minutes or, or just because you want to get to the point quicker. I mean, there's a whole host of reasons, but the fact that they got. The Trump administration got anything from the process of editing and is now going on to threaten other media organizations is a really dangerous signal.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah, it's a combination of pure corruption because here's a bunch of money so that you leave us alone and just the narrowing of actual free speech norms as compared to something we'll talk about a little bit later. Colbert show appears to have been sacrificed to appease the Trump administration gods behind the fcc. Meanwhile, someone I bring up a lot on this podcast looks set to benefit from these types of developments. Bari Weiss is in talks herself with Skydance Media about a potential acquisition. According to the Financial Times, she's seeking a valuation as high as $250 million on her company, the Free Press.

[Derek Barris]

Same as us. All right.

[Kristen Bell]

Roughly, I mean, we're almost there. Same bracket, right? The Free Press was started as a substack blog just four years ago after Weiss had very dramatically resigned from her roughly three year role as staff opinion editor at the New York Times in July of 2020. And this was in the early months of COVID right and the summer of George Floyd. And Weiss had become increasingly unpopular at the paper for her contrarian positions and complaints about the paper supposed stifling of free speech. In a very public resignation letter, she accused her bosses of creating a hostile work environment, her colleagues of bullying her and the paper of caving too easily to the whims of critics on Twitter. The Free Press then was positioned as a remedy to the terrible problems with woke American media. And Weiss very quickly found a lot of support and enough money coming in to expand to a paid staff of five. The audience continued to grow quickly and venture capitalist injections would then come from Marc Andreessen, David Sacks and others of their ilk. More recently, British conservative media tycoon Paul Marshall, who owns the Spectator, GB News and Unherd, became a major investor as well. Now, over the last four years, the Free Press only continued to grow by trending more and more to the right, promoting anti woke culture war stories as if they are hidden by the mainstream media. And it takes this brave independent voice to reveal that to us. And also sane washing Trump.

[Derek Barris]

I'm somewhat lenient when it comes to funding in terms of people and these large investment companies, they spread their money out in a lot of directions to look for a return. They know they're going to lose. Andreessen Horowitz is notorious for this, meaning they will throw small amounts of money at tons of companies knowing that one of them is going to hit. And that is just the name of the game, unfortunately. And sometimes there's. You find out things like when I was looking into Function Health, Mark Hyman's company, which I'm very critical of, I saw that Pedro Pascal is an investor and part of me is like, damn, I really like him. But someone is probably handling his portfolio. We don't know the sort of connections that exist there. In this case, however, she is being funded, she's being funded by a very conservative, libertarian, techno focused roster of people. And when you have that kind of funding pressure coming from you, it's just it either means they are already aligned with what you're doing and want to see more of it, or they're going to put pressure on you to cover things from a certain angle. And Bari Weiss is not disappointed.

[Kristen Bell]

And when you have a group of venture capitalists like the ones that you are referring to and the ones I just listed, some of them then interfacing with a very small but very influential company, there's a lot of firewalls and procedural kind of barricades that would be there, say with some legacy media, especially in the past, that's just not there. It's Bari Weiss talking directly to whomever the person is, you know, I would.

[Dax Shepard]

Imagine at a restaurant.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Or Right. Like over, like over Zoom or on speed dial or through WhatsApp. It's, it's very, very close relationships. Yeah.

[Kristen Bell]

Or not that Barry Weiss was necessarily there, but as an example at the conference that Jordan Peterson spoke at that I did a brief about a few months ago that was largely funded by Paul Marshall's organization and his investment group, which is very, very heavily like. Paul Marshall is basically, I would say, aspiring to be something like Rupert Murdock in terms of his ability to control a lot of the media. And his main agenda is anti any kind of climate measures. And that has to do with his investment portfolio. So yeah, here we are. Let's pause there to list some of why I'm not a fan of Bari Weiss. So we covered her day after the election interview with Peter Thiel last year that was titled the Triumph of the Counter Elites. She glazed the openly anti democracy Svengali to JD Vance for two hours straight while he simultaneously managed to frame the oligarch, mega donors and Project 2025 Christian nationalists as the anti elite rogue alliance from Star wars, but then also critiqued the Democratic Party leadership for not having gone to Ivy League schools and therefore not being very smart. Weiss also hosted, promoted and moderated a live debate here in LA which featured Anna Kachian of Red SC on the question has the Sexual Revolution Failed? And I believe the original title may have been more along the lines of has the Sexual Revolution Failed Women? Which is the what sort of alludes to the title of one of the panelists on that debate that was back in December of 2023. This year they hosted a debate titled does the west need a Religious Revival?

[Dax Shepard]

So in every case, like the answer to the question posed is basically the wrong one.

[Derek Barris]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Kristen Bell]

These themes as featured in their choices of debate topics fit in with endless think pieces at the Free Press about things like the ethics of interfaith marriage, how Catholicism got cool, and they're talking about the JD Vance Opus DEI Rod Dreher version of Catholicism. Why it's logical to believe in God. And these articles also sit alongside the celebrating of the self. Same Covid contrarians, anti vaxxers and pseudoscience peddlers we have critiqued for years before they then ascended to the highest positions in our medical science institutions, painting them. I'm talking about RFK Jr. And Jay Bhattacharya, people like that as brave outsiders who've now been vindicated. Then there's the recurrent claim, often coming directly from Bari Weiss's lips, that the lab leak hypothesis has turned out to be true. And it hasn't.

[Derek Barris]

And it also lines up with the funding because the perspective that many of the funders take, which is that Covid is either not as bad as it was or hoax, whatever it is, and business needs to get back operating as quickly as possible, is the line she's been towing. Now it could just be that that is her belief as well, but it does fit very well into that profile and she has only platform these health contrarians. And even when she does push back, like I saw her push back on Bhattachary and Hyman a bit on vaccines, she doesn't have the scientific chops to actually push back. So she'll say, but how about. And then they'll answer and eventually she'll let it go without actually making any progress in their arguments. So that's, that's a real problem, especially for someone who's supposedly trying to have open conversations. They never seem to be actually informed or grounded anything that would matter except from the perspective of the people she's platforming.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah, she is very actively engaged in taking offense at anything woke and, or dei and very phobic at offending any of the reactionary people that she interviews or the conspiracy theorists, pseudoscience pedalists, etc. So now that Barry Weiss, she's kind of the, the, the icon of this, right? The archetype of this. She's ridden this turbocharged opportunistic elevator to the new media grift pinnacle. She's looking to cash out 250 million is a very ambitious asking price given that the annual subscription revenue at the Free Burst is, is currently estimated at about 15 million. So it's very ambitious. But this is not Weiss's only entanglement with the oligarchs. She's also a founder and member of the board of trustees at the glorified conservative think tank known as the University of Austin. And that's alongside Joe Lonsdale, who is co founder with Peter Thiel of Palantir Technologies, as well as conservative British historian.

[Derek Barris]

Niall Ferguson Palantir, which was just cited today as being worth $275 billion, making it more valuable than a lot of the tech companies Thiel has funded that exist in America.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah, yeah. And probably the scariest tech company ever to have existed. Appropriately named after the all seeing evil eye of Soren or one of the stones. Correct me, Lord of the Rings people.

[Derek Barris]

Colbert will come on to correct you.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah. So far, University of Austin has raised about $200 million in seed money and she's one of the founders. Some of that comes from investors like Harlan Crow. Remember him? He's the Clarence Thomas SCOTUS corruption scandal guy. They raised funding last year using a video that contrasted one of their small classes in the office building that they inhabit with pro Palestine protests at places like Columbia University. Like, don't send your kids there, Send them here. The first cohort started, so they've had one group of students. In 2024, with just 100 students, every single one of them was given a full scholarship. So call it a university is a stretch to complete the Rogues gallery here. Executives from Elon Musk's SpaceX are apparently involved in the programming for the engineering courses at the school. So university, of course, not accredited. But I would argue that Barry Wise has emerged as one of the most influential media, cultural and educational drivers of the post Truth era, all while posturing as this plucky little independent free speech warrior.

[Dax Shepard]

Isn't that her main sort of capital is that she's actually able to fulfill many, many cultural roles while sort of affecting this kind of independence?

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. She, she somehow she's found it's a. It's a different kind of charismatic influence than I think we've covered before. Right. She's able to position herself. I think a lot of it has to do with. With coming onto the national stage quite young and being very outspoken and very eloquent, but also sort of very, very appealing. As someone who was just speaking common.

[Dax Shepard]

Sense, she's able to really mimic a kind of credibility that is recognizable to, I think, you know, a lot of consumers of legacy media.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah, I bet the Columbia education helps with that. She has a certain way of speaking. Yeah. So back to the media side of the growing Bari Weiss empire. In addition to her talks with Skydance's David Ellison, she reportedly has also had separate meetings with Rupert Murdoch's news corps about potential collaborations. Meanwhile, again, based on reporting from Financial Times, Ellison apparently wants to position the Free Press alongside CBS News. And he has found the Free Press appealing due in part to their pro Israel stance in lobbying for the merger with Paramount. Ellison has assured the FCC that he will dismantle DEI at cbs. That's a lot of three letter acronyms and create an ombudsman to monitor complaints of bias. So we know where this is going. That bit about CBS is important because about the news branch, because in addition to caving to Trump's lawfare against political opposition, in addition to being willing to axe Colbert, potentially bringing Bari Weiss's media company into the mainstream means that conspiracy theories, anti woke talking points, pseudoscience peddlers, Christian nationalists and other reactionary voices at the heart of dismantling our democracy right now will continue to be legitimized. The opportunism and hypocrisy of Bari and her ilk is quite blatant. The very accusations of audience capture ideological bias and collaborating on censorship that Weiss and her outfit, cosplayed as opposing, are now openly for sale to the highest bidder.

[Derek Barris]

The idea that any media organization in this day and time would actually be able to hire an independent ombudsman to, to oversee things, I just, I just don't see it happening at this point given how fractured media is. And it also plays into this perpetual repetition in media. I, years ago on this podcast I did an episode where I talked about the history of media. And the reality is we're 500 years this idea of presenting news in some capacity to people through a written or the evolution of those texts in terms of podcasts, media, video, etc, and we're about 170 years into the idea of unbiased news being presented. And throughout that entire time there have been two ways it's been monetized. It has been done through subscriptions and through advertisements or, or funders. We'll put that in the subscription. But so people coming in and funding that. So anytime something comes around like Weiss saying, you know, we're going to create a new space that doesn't exist anymore, or a brand new space that has never existed, it is inevitably going to fall into the same buckets there for better and worse because people need support. Some people will remain independent, take subscriptions, some people do advertisements. We do both for a variety of reason. But when you get down to it, she is going to be beholden to whoever is writing those checks. And when you decide that you're going to get in bed with people who have a very specific view of the news, then you are going to have to parrot them if you want to keep that money flowing in. And that is Just the situation she's in now, if she does sell to a higher bidder, who is going to come in and then give Andreessen, Horowitz and all the others their return on their investment, which is what they want, and she will still be beholden to certain rules. And given that Paramount says the canceling of Colbert was purely for financial reasons, we know otherwise. And she's going to now be beholden to that as well.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah. So you're saying the technology changes, the type of platform changes. Right. The way you get, the way that the money flows to some extent changes. But the model is basically a very, very old model. And I would argue that within that as much as we can be super critical of legacy media for a bunch of different reason, there was something that evolved over time in legacy media to attempt to limit bias and editorial control from the moneyed interests as much as possible. And that's what we've tried to, you know, hold up as good journalism. Right.

[Derek Barris]

The New York Times, that is the one that came in to try to create it. And for better or worse, they've done a pretty good job to varying degrees.

[Dax Shepard]

I just like, given that this is the way of the world, Derek, that everybody's going to move into one of these two funding streams, what problem or what market hole is Bari Weiss filling? Because it's not like the content is discernibly different from, you know, right word leaning centrism and the rest of the media landscape. It seems to me that like the actual value that she brings is the appearance of independence, as I was saying before. But, but specifically in an era in which not even rightward leaning centrists are trusting the major networks. And so what they need for the time being, until the co optation is complete and until people can start complaining that Bari Weiss is just repeating talking points from the administration or whatever they need. The $250 million that her company is worth is basically the appearance of her being an independent person. Like that's, it's, it's really about just the person, isn't it?

[Derek Barris]

It's charisma, which is the original model 500 years ago in Italy, meaning that the way that broadsheets started in the news were that certain men would go and talk to the people returning from the ships, gather information, and then try to sell that to business owners and landlords. That is how news originated. And so it relied on who can I convince to pay me to go get the news from the people on the ships. So there's, there's not much difference between the, the sort of illusion that Weiss is putting up. I mean, at least then they really were going down the ships to gather the information. Weiss, you know, who knows how, how biased it was at the time. I'm sure there were always biases because a lot of the times what would happen were the landlords, they wanted to make control, maintain control of the local business, so received news they didn't want the, the public to hear about. They would not allow them to be published in the broadsheets. So again, not much different from where we started.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah, I mean, Matthew, to your point, I think the hole that she's filling, I mean, it would be interesting to really, really dig into all the details on this at some point. But I feel like, you know, the, the Fox News phenomenon, the, the, the far right news channels being sort of seen as legit, legitimate by a certain amount of the culture. And then they're through their culture war tactics, framing all other media as having liberal bias. You end up with a group of people who, a group of consumers who are looking for something that is not too extreme on the left or the right. They're looking for people who are speaking common sense, people who are not beholden to some ideological purity. That is the situation we found ourselves in, especially in the last 10 years. And with the rise of digital tools, I think it just opened up a whole space for people to present themselves that way to consumers who really didn't identify with the Fox News kind of ideology, but were open to some right wing talking points. And you know what we inevitably see with most of these people as they trend further and further to the right over time. But that where they start off is appealing to people who don't necessarily identify as right wing in the way that a Fox viewer might. Foreign.

[Dax Shepard]

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[Kristen Bell]

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[Dax Shepard]

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[Kristen Bell]

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[Dax Shepard]

Between you, your friends and your family. No one else, not even us.

[Kristen Bell]

WhatsApp message privately with everyone.

[Dax Shepard]

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[Kristen Bell]

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[Derek Barris]

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[Derek Barris]

Terms apply on July 21, Children's Health Defense, the anti vax nonprofit RFK Jr. Founded from the previously inconsequential World Mercury Project, announced that it was suing its founder, RFK Jr. Now why are they doing that?

[Kristen Bell]

What?

[Derek Barris]

Because Kennedy has supposedly failed to establish a task force dedicated to making childhood vaccines safer. According to the Children's Health Defense blog.

[Kristen Bell]

The lawsuit alleges Kennedy is violating the National Child Vaccine injury Act of 1986, which requires the Secretary of the U.S. department of Health and Human Services to promote the development of safer childhood vaccines that cause fewer and less serious adverse reactions than existing ones.

[Derek Barris]

Before we get into discussion and analysis the 1986 act, here's what it does. It established the next National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which is a no fault alternative to traditional lawsuits that allow individuals alleging harm from certain vaccines to seek compensation through a special program instead of from the courts. The act stabilized vaccine supplies and costs by limiting the financial liability of manufacturers and providing compensation for rare adverse outcomes. It required mandatory reporting and record keeping by health care providers and vaccine manufacturers. And it promoted safer vaccines by tasking the Secretary of HHS with promoting research for safer vaccines and providing Congress with biennial progress reports. The Children's Health Defense lawsuit says that this is all not being done.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah, but I think they may have misspelled another phrase, which is or another sentence, which is it has turned out not to be necessary because they're already subject to Phase three trials and are specific spectacularly safe and effective.

[Derek Barris]

But who are doing the trials? Julian? Okay, why would they sue their founder? Obviously they're claiming it's for the children, but it also follows a playbook that Kennedy himself established while heading up Children's Health Defense. And it's the same one he's used as a so called environmental champion before he trained his focus on vaccines, which is sue anyone and Everyone to get the legislation that you want passed, which is why this lawsuit sounds pretty suspect to me. Dr. Peter Hotez, who is wonderful on social media, he is one of the most vocal vaccine proponents in America. This is what he told cnn.

[Dax Shepard]

It's difficult to know how much of this is performative. The steady stream of pseudoscience policies and propaganda pushed out of the Humphrey building in Washington D.C. are both straight out of playbooks from both RFK Jr. And Children's Health Defense. As far as I can tell, there's no real daylight between the two.

[Derek Barris]

In my opinion, Hotez nails it there. Take Kennedy to court so that he can say, my hands are tied. I have to push this thing forward. It's a neat way to further endanger the childhood vaccination schedule while continuing to foment distrust in vaccines overall, which is what they've been doing for months and years. UC Law San Francisco professor Dorrit Reese also told CNN that it looks performative.

[Kristen Bell]

She said it may give Kennedy cover for convening this task force, that he may already want to convene. It may well be collusion. To me, this looks like a way to give political cover to something the Secretary may want to do anyway and can do without anything. The government has answers to this lawsuit, but may not want to.

[Derek Barris]

Kennedy never seems to want to answer things he doesn't want to address. A few days after this suit was announced, it was revealed that he plans to disband the US Preventive Services Task Force. This is a 16 member volunteer advisory group that was established in 1984 and is predominantly made up of practicing clinicians in internal medicine, pediatrics, nursing, behavioral health and obgyn. The panel's primary responsibility is to make evidence based recommendations about clinical preventive services, including screenings like cancer screenings, counsel services and preventive medications. Their work shapes preventive care practices across the US and guides which services are covered for Americans at no out of pocket cost.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah, but it makes sense though that he'd want to get rid of that because, you know, a lot of Americans are now going to stop consuming food dyes and they're going to eat fast food that's been fried in tallow instead of seed oils. They're going to enjoy the benefits of bacteria rich raw milk. He's really making America healthy again. They're going to have real sugar in their Coca Cola. So most of that western medicine stuff is going to be obsolete. Right, Derek?

[Derek Barris]

I woke up to a text from Mallory because two people we regularly cover were on each other's podcast and they were talking about how bad Trader Joe's is and just look at it and you're like, you people are fomenting eating disorders over to everyone like you. Nothing except Erewhon is going to be pure enough for you. We're seeing this all the time. It's so ridiculous.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, but Erewhon's probably going to be trans.

[Kristen Bell]

Right next. Next on the chopping log of purity.

[Derek Barris]

It's definitely when I was in there in la, I started, saw one company had a rainbow on their packaging. So, you know, that's.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, man. Were those artificial colors in the rainbow?

[Derek Barris]

No, they were natural food diets. I want to go back to what I said about Americans. This is really important because what's happening is the task force, when they say something, it helps shape policy so that Americans don't have to pay for out of pocket things. So I just got my shingles vaccine, my first dose, having turned 50, and my insurance covered it because it's under that bucket. Because I'm 50, I qualify. I've had chickenpox in the past. I didn't have to pay for my insurance covered it. If. If RFK was just like, yeah, no, fuck the shingles vaccine, then it would no longer be covered by insurance. So that's that. You know, extrapolate from that and apply that to every sort of preventive medication out there that exists. Which clues us into why he's disbanding the panel. I've speculated a lot that he has mandated to follow the Project 2025 playbook. He wouldn't have been allowed into the Trump administration without agreeing to follow their deregulatory practices. He's repeatedly stated he has issues with Medicare and Medicaid, which is another way of saying he wants to completely privatize health care. I've already said that I feel he's going to soon shuffle taxpayer money earmarked for health care to his buddies like Mark Hyman and Function Health, who I mentioned, maybe the mean siblings. He's more than hinted at this when he says he wants every American to wear a wearable to track health. Which is exactly what Casey means. Company levels, offers. We know his love for supplements and that slots in Cali and Hyman. There's another layer here too, and we covered this in our book and I more recently wrote about it in the essay of the week for the Guardian, which is eugenics. I learned about Kennedy's disbanding of the panel on Blue sky from cancer and nutritional epidemiologist Elizabeth Jacobs. I really enjoy her posts. And in response to her post, which was just informative, off message co host.

[Dax Shepard]

Brian Buetler, he responded, republicans are waging a generalized war on science, but I think many of them don't fully grok that RFK isn't at war with science alone or per se. He's at war with sick people. And of the view that only the lucky should be allowed to survive into old age. They are no nothings. He is Mengele.

[Derek Barris]

And then New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie chimed in, writing, when RFK says.

[Kristen Bell]

He wants to end chronic disease, what people hear is, he wants to cure us. But what he means is, I want to cull the weak.

[Dax Shepard]

I just want to say that, you know, we came up to the edge of saying things like that over probably the last three years, I think. I can't remember when we started using the phrase soft eugenics. Yeah, I mean, it was in our book. But hearing more mainstream commentators just come right out and say it is kind of shocking, actually, because it's like I'm seeing it in black and white. It's almost like I didn't quite trust my own analysis to begin with. And like now, well, it's obvious, isn't it?

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah. We may have felt that we were warning of some, you know, potential escalation that had a flavor of this kind of thing, and now it's like, no, that's actually exactly what it is.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And there's this process of not quite believing that that's the intention until there's enough sort of water in the boat to the fact, you know, point that you're sinking. And then, yeah, like, what else are you going to conclude, actually? And you know, guys, I don't know if I'm imagining this or I'm making it up, but everything about RFK these days just looks more aggravated, more ill, more belligerent than when he was on the campaign trail. We watched him spend two years begging for power and basically showing up everywhere on every podcast he could shake a stick at hat in hand. I don't think governing feels very good for him or for anyone in Trump's cabinet, but I've just really noticed, notice that. That things look a lot more sort of disturbed.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah. I mean, it makes me think of how Obama was, I think, one of the youngest presidents we've had in a while, and. And his eight years in power, he aged significantly and, you know, he looked really good when he started. I could only imagine what's gonna happen to RFK Jr. Given his starting point.

[Derek Barris]

There's the physical looks, but there's also just his attitude, like, yeah, he's always been a stubborn asshole, but now it's just he feels that everyone has to bow to him. And just more. One more point here. Just yesterday, we're recording on Tuesday. So on Monday, he announced, along with Linda McMahon, that they are going after Duke University and Duke Medical School specifically because they're saying that they were following WOKE policies and they're going to look into it. It's just another shakedown. So we started this episode talking about Trump shaking down Paramount, and now Kennedy has just been following Trump's playbook at every step. I mean, Maha Maga. Every step. They are going to shake down Duke now and hold, probably hold back funding and investigate them because what. Because they're actually turning out larger number of African American and Latino and women doctors. That's basically what they're saying.

[Dax Shepard]

Just to follow up on this reticence that I think I personally had around going straight to Mengele, I think I spent a lot of time hand wringing over, you know, his family history is so complicated. You know, he grew up praying to Saint Francis of Assisi. And, you know, he's like, you know, he likes the Falcons and he likes the outdoors and he likes, he's such a complicated guy. And I'm like, what the fuck? What am I? And also, I think that part of that comes out of my own sort of, you know, familial, democratic, not idealization of the Kennedys, but at least the idea that there's something complicated going on. Right, sure. At least that these are conflicting people that have some good impulses and some bad impulses. And I'm like, I wasted my time on all of that. I can tell you.

[Derek Barris]

That's why they say, never meet your heroes. Right. Like you, you meet someone and then you're like, oh, you're not who I imagined at all. And that happens over and over again.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I, I never thought of him as any kind of hero. I just, I wanted to. Well, part of, part of what I think was going on for me is I wanted to try to understand what was so compelling about him to his own followers. Because if I could understand that, I could speak more directly to, oh, who is this Maha gang that's gathering underneath him? And I think there is some, like, there's some value in that. I think that value is gone because he's in power now. He doesn't need any of those, those dupes. And so, yeah, I think it's more of like a Sociological reflection on, oh, what was attractive about this guy who people thought, you know, Aubrey Marcus thought he was literally, you know, guided by God, and so did. So did Charles Eisenstein.

[Derek Barris]

Yeah.

[Kristen Bell]

I mean, do you think maybe there was this hope that there was some. That if we understood his psychology and his history enough, some of the core kind of moral motivators might be constraints against this kind of shit?

[Dax Shepard]

I think so. And I think that is also sort of evidenced by whatever we learned, whatever we knew about his environmental record, because that is there. Right?

[Kristen Bell]

Sure.

[Dax Shepard]

It's not like. And I saw him speak in probably 2002 or something like that on a stage at the Fighting Bob convention in Wisconsin, and he was extremely compelling. Right. Like, he was an amazing speaker on, you know, ecological justice. So I think that probably stuck in my brain for long enough for me to say, how the hell is this happening? Is it really. Does it really have to go this far? But it's. Yeah. I don't know. The good. The. Sometimes the goodness in people just disappears.

[Derek Barris]

I wasn't implying that Kennedy was ever a hero to you, but I just. From my experience as a music journalist, like, I would love these people's records. And then when I would talk to them, I'd be like, oh, fuck, you're an asshole.

[Matthew Remsky]

Yep.

[Dax Shepard]

Musicians are terrible for that.

[Derek Barris]

Thankfully. Thankfully, one of the one I was most nervous about was Ben Harper, and he turned out to be amazing. And I ran into him years later in a. In a DOSA shop, and he was awesome. So.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, good.

[Derek Barris]

Sometimes your heroes do turn out to be good, but not always.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, changing pace just a little bit here, guys. This next figure is not really in the same category as the. As the previous two. And I want to talk about James Talarico, and that has to start with his recent appearance on Joe Rogan. And I'll just say that. That it's taken Joe about eight months to go from endorsing Trump on the eve of the election to hosting this guy who's 36 years old, he's from Texas, he's a Democratic state rep, and he is on his show. And at this certain point, Joe just says kind of really nonchalantly, but quite pointedly at the same time and directly, you should run for president. And then he breaks into this moment of cathartic laughter, like he can't believe he just said that. And then what he says is, we need someone who's actually a good person. And I think Rogan is kind of telling on himself here, maybe on his prior judgment, because, you know, He's a little bit feckless and I'm sure he's going to continue to be a kind of infotainment Pepe Le Pew, this cartoon skunk who's floating involuntarily after whatever wafting smell hits his nostrils, unaware that it's his own farts. But I think he can also feel something in the air around Talarico. And I don't think he's alone. This guy has a million followers on Instagram. He has a hundred thousand YouTube subs. One of his videos, which we'll quote from, catches 1 million views. And the title of that is James Talarico Delivers Sermon Against Christian Nationalism. So what's the hook on that sermon? Here's what he says right at the top.

[Matthew Remsky]

My faith means more to me than anything. But if I'm being very honest, sometimes I hesitate before telling someone I'm a Christian. There is a cancer on our religion. Until we confess the sin that is Christian nationalism and exorcise it from our churches, our religion can do a lot more damage than a six pack of Lone Star. There is nothing Christian about Christian nationalism. It is the worship of power, social power, economic power, political power in the name of Christ.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so you can hear, hear his voice, which is like magnificent. But also his delivery in general in these sermons is very powerful. He can tell jokes too. Like the quip about Lone Star beer. It rolls off a bunch of opening quips about how beer can be better than religion because when you have beer, you don't knock on other people's doors trying to give it away and so on. And I think that might be part of what gets him in Rogan's door. Which reminds me of the joke about how do you get to Carnegie, Hal? And the other thing is that he's on the stage here at his Presbyterian church in Austin. He's on the altar and he delivers. I watched probably 5 or 625 minute sermons and they are fully memorized. There's no teleprompter. He's not consulting notes or anything like that. He's got it all. No stumbles, no sort of. He's not backing out of anything. So just presentation wise, pretty, you know, pretty, pretty special guy.

[Kristen Bell]

Talented and polished, right? Talented and polished, yeah, very polished.

[Dax Shepard]

Very polished. And I think I've been behind the curve on this guy who I think, well, I'm going to argue he's shaping up to be an antidote to the conspirituality stream of American Christianity. For the past couple of years, I've argued that one of the cures for bad religion is better religion. And, you know, I think that he brings it. And I've heard about him for a number of months, but now I really dug in.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah. I mean, this is interesting, Matthew, because you and I had quite different reactions to the initial sort of point of discussion here, which was a clip from that Joe Rogan episode that was kind of going viral on Instagram, was published by now this impact.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Kristen Bell]

And you know, the thing for me is I, I like his demeanor. I like his politics. He's young, he's progressive, he's humble, he seems like a passionate public servant, is sincere. I would most likely agree with most, if not all, of his politics. Politics. But my sticking point is I don't think the reason Christian nationalism is a problem is that someone interpreted this old book incorrectly when really Jesus actually wants us all to be progressives. And for me, it's, it's just kind of out of place to justify either conservative or progressive politics with scripture, as if it is some kind of moral authority on how we ought to structure society, like politically. I just don't envision a sea change in which a decent percentage of the evangelical right somehow gets born again on abortion and gay marriage. Because James Talarico has a wonderful way with words, you know.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I understand that argument. I think that we'll get to the passage where he does cite scripture, but in this opening, he's not using scripture at all. He's talking about a culture of Christianity that he adheres to, and he's saying that it doesn't include this cancer of nationalism. So he's talking about his political values. He's going to cite scripture because that's the culture he moves in. I just don't think it has, you know, he has to do that to make a basic value statement about nationalism.

[Kristen Bell]

That's true. And, and I actually, I, I agree with his critique, with this criticism of Christian nationalism, but I, I, he's, he's criticizing it based on. That's the wrong interpretation of Christianity. I have the right interpretation. And, and we've been down that road before. This one just happens to be, you know, wearing more progressive clothing. It's, to me, it's still the heart of, it is still a kind of fallacy or out of place in our political system with separation of church and state.

[Derek Barris]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, you also say, though, that, you know, you not. I can't imagine him changing anybody's mind because he has a way with words. But it's not just that. I mean, he gets onto Rogan because he actually does have a robust activist legislative record. You know, in the state House he's doing school reform stuff, you know, pre K class size caps, banning reality TV policing. I didn't even know this was a thing. He, he's capped insulin co pays. He's also pushing a constitutional amendment to prohibit the legislature from restricting access to abortion against all of the sort of Trump legislative action.

[Kristen Bell]

So fantastic.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, he's doing a lot.

[Derek Barris]

Yeah. Julian said that he likes his politics. I agree too. Everything I've seen from his politics is great, great. I don't know why you need to inject metaphysics in any capacity into any of that because it plays absolutely zero role. We're going to get to the clip. We don't need to argue that now. I'll have thoughts then. But it plays zero role in actually legislating with the people. Even if it's in the background, you don't have to foreground it.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, yeah, I think what I'd say is that if you're looking for, you know, some kind of sea change in evangelicals, you never know what kind of permission someone's going to need to think differently about what they've been taught. And if the guy is going to use metaphysical language to speak to that portion of the population, that might work. Because the cognitive dissonance that Christians have to hold around saying that they worship a God of love while they should also dominate women or dehumanize trans people is really powerful. And you never know who's going to what's going to break that. Right?

[Kristen Bell]

Sure.

[Dax Shepard]

Anyway, I saw him probably eight months ago because there was this viral clip of him grilling his GOP colleague, state Rep, on her bill that was going to mandate the posting of the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom in the state.

[Matthew Remsky]

I say this to you as a fellow Christian, represent noble. I know you're a devout Christian. And so my, this bill to me is not only unconstitutional, it's not only un American. I think it is also deeply unchristian. And I say that because I believe this bill is idolatrous. I believe it is exclusionary and I believe it is arrogant. And those three things in my reading of the Gospel are diametrically opposed to the teachings of Jewish Jesus. You probably know Matthew 6, 5 when Jesus says don't be like the hypocrites who love to pray publicly on street corners. When you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your father who is in secret a religion that has to force people to put up a poster to prove its legitimacy is a dead religion.

[Dax Shepard]

So that really pricked up my ears. But I didn't really follow up on it to find out that he's basically doing that. In every committee meeting that he sits on. He eviscerates his fellow Christians who happen to be bigots on their bills about school vouchers and trans panics. And there's this one video where he's going to town on the guy who did the furries act, who just made up this bullshit about how public schools are putting cat litter into their classrooms and stuff like that because children are acting like cats or whatever. And he just, just question after question after question, just tearing this guy to shreds in the most polite and mannerful way I've seen, you know, with this, you know, clarity of the grade school teacher that he was, you know, and the politeness of the Presbyterian minister he's training to be.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah, I mean, it's really fantastic. If only to see these guys get roasted in their own language and with a version of their own theology. I just, I just wish it wasn't happening in a government capacity. You know what I mean? Like, like, I, I don't, I don't want the fate of our children or of women's freedoms and control over their body to rest on which particular strain of Christian ideology ends up having political ascendancy in our country. Like, I, I don't want any of it anywhere near the government.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I mean, that's fair. But it's here, right? Sure, it's there. It's there because he's responding to it in its own framework.

[Kristen Bell]

Yes, yes. Which. It's important that he be able to do that.

[Dax Shepard]

So who is he? His bio is pretty plain. Comes from a single mom home, had a fairly stable church experience life growing up. He began to teach in elementary school. All of his education degrees are in educational theory and philosophy. He's done a lot of progressive kitchen table lawmaking in Texas in a short time. But I do want to spend some time on his theology and inspirational sources because I was able to collate them from analyzing several sermons that he's given to his home congregation. But also while he does these drubbings of his fellow Christians in the statehouse. So he regularly pings his granddad, dad, who was a Baptist preacher, as a staunch defender of the separation of church and state. This is a big part of his whole deal. His line on the establishment clause is that only a dead religion. So he mentioned this in the Clip that we just heard. Only a dead religion has to seek power through mandating belief. He has this other grandfather who was an Italian immigrant, and I guess this is where the name comes from, who lived through Catholic theocracy in Italy and used to take young James on walks to meet God or the great outdoors. He was an agnostic at most, a real free thinker. Right. And so Talarico also takes this line coming out of liberation theology that describes Jesus as a revolutionary Jewish rabbi who only taught two laws, love God and your neighbor. And he says, training. I found this interesting. Training to be a minister while being a legislator has put them in the full fire of that tension. Like, you love God as a minister, you love your neighbor as a legislator. He also references the jubilee tradition of the Torah, which he says is central to Jesus's politics. When Jesus talks about this is the year of the Lord, he's talking about, like, the jubilee, which is every seven years the culture goes through a Sabbath reset and they redistribute wealth and, you know, people who are doing indentured labor are released and all kinds of things are sort of rebalanced and everybody takes a deep breath for a whole year. He also loves Rumi. He quotes a lot of different sources, which I'll get to. He loves particularly the quote, every religion has love, but love has no religion. He also quotes Hafiz. God repeats only four words, come dance with me. He loves that one. Tallarico also is broadly ecumenical because he cites Ahimsa as an alternative to the logical violence. He says Buddhist meditation as an alternative to the abuse of attention. He references Taoist teachings, teachings, you know, the soft overcomes the hard. And he also says that Native American traditions provide some kind of alternative to ecological abstraction. So these are all sort of like in his back pocket. He's also ruthless on capitalism, and his sort of biblical perspective on that is that he finds, you know, 3,000 pings for economic justice in the Bible, but none for abortion. Now in his library. Here are some other references that he makes. He really loves Dorothy Sola, who's a German theologian, progressive activist, who said there's only one legitimation of power, and that is to share it with others. He loves Barbara Brown Taylor, a theologian who concentrated on the Good Samaritan parable by saying that if she had to choose between her religion and her neighbor, of course she'd choose her neighbor. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who I'm actually doing some work on now, he was the German pastor who was executed by the Nazis for his Support for a plot to assassinate Hitler. Oscar Romero, the Catholic bishop who advocated for the poor. He's assassinated on the altar by a Salvadorian death squad sent by the US backed junta. He said, as a Christian, I don't believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me, I will rise again in the people of El Salvador. Which is like a directly poetic translation of what like a literal resurrection belief would mean. Father Richard Rohr, he quotes Dorothy Day, he loves in his sermon against Christian nationalism. This is the most far out woo he gets. He cites the Catholic philosopher and evolutionary biologist Teilhardt Le Chardin, who asserts that the very physical universe is love, which is very Marianne Williamson. So there is some New Agey bars that are spitting back against what he sees as the rigid exclusionism of Christian nationalism. But let's get to the quote at hand, right? This is the thing that went viral. This is the excerpt from the Rogan appearance where Talarico makes a theological and biblical argument for taking a pro choice position.

[Matthew Remsky]

Mary is probably my, my favorite figure in the book Bible, the mother of Jesus. And you know, she is, she's an oppressed peasant teenage girl living in poverty under an oppressive empire as a Jew. And she, she has a vision from God that she's going to give birth to a baby who's going to bring the powerful down from their thrones, going to scatter the, the proud, who's going to send the rich away empty. I mean the, this, this revolutionary song that she sings, it's called the Magnificat and it's actually been banned by certain authoritarian regimes because it is so radical. But I say all this in terms of, in context of abortion because before God comes over Mary and, and we have the incarnation, God asks for Mary's consent, which is remarkable. I mean, go back and read this in Luke. I mean, the angel comes down and asks Mary if this is something she wants to do. And she says, if it is God's will, let it be done. Let it be, let it happen. So to me, that is an affirmation in one of our most central stories that creation has to be done with consent. You cannot force someone to create. Creation is one of the most sacred acts that we engage in as human beings. But that has to be done with consent. It has to be done with freedom.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah, so this one was a major eye roller for me. I like where he's going with it, but he's way out on a limb in terms of how he's trying to justify it. He's shoehorning pro Choice politics. Into what? The Holy Spirit asking the Virgin Mary's consent for the immaculate conception of Jesus.

[Dax Shepard]

So it's the enunciation, it's not the Holy Spirit, it's Gabriel, but that's okay.

[Kristen Bell]

Okay, well, we should be clear about that.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Kristen Bell]

So none of that ever happened. I think he'd do much better to make a moral argument grounded in reality. And then if he wants to reference being inspired by Christ's compassion or something like that, and then quote Rumi, that I'd be fine with that. But to me, we're always on dangerous ground when we're justifying any political stance by the authority of God's very special.

[Derek Barris]

I'm in agreement with all of that. I mean, I. I do like where he gets up. I've long said that. But if your religion brings you to be a good person and. And Val. And cherish the value and freedom of others, then I don't really care how you got there. But he is in a public role here, making a public argument, and he has legislative power. My issue with. With this special book thing is, is more of one of just trying to understand how we got to a place where. I'm reading Cormac McCarthy the. The Border trilogy right now. I'm sure there are people who have done, you know, studies on the use of his understanding of environmentalism in his books. I can think about someone who maybe has done a study on the role of cats in Murakame's novels, because they appear in every one of them. Or take the Oryx and Craig trilogy where she talks about Happy Kappa and the role that Happy Kappa plays throughout. Like. Like literary scholars look into these things. Yet we've taken these couple of books throughout time and said, no, no, no, these are real. Over here we have all this imagery, metaphor, mythology we can study, we can try to understand how it plays into reality. But these ones, these texts, they really happened. And that will always get me tripped up, because one of the best classes that I took one while getting a degree in religion was called Bible is Literature, and it was presented by a Catholic priest, but he was not pushing religion. He really treated it as a novel. And it was absolutely fantastic because it was the first time in my life that I was really starting to be able to understand the metaphors and how we could relate to actual moments in life without getting caught up in, oh, these metaphysics actually happened. And I think think along the lines with what you're saying, Julian. As long as we keep treating the metaphysics as real, we're never going to make actual progress.

[Dax Shepard]

But I want to know, Derek, why do you think Talarico isn't doing exactly what your Catholic priest was doing with Bibles literature?

[Derek Barris]

Because he's not saying that. He's not qualifying it. He's presenting it as if it's a real thing. He, God asks for Mary's consent. He. Nowhere in, in that class that I took, he made it very clear that the Bible was something that was treated as real by a lot of people. But we're going to be looking at it differently. I didn't see any of those qualifiers coming from Talarico here.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, he gave them though, because he rounds out that statement by saying that theology and scripture are interpretive and that no one should assume that a dogmatic Christian position on abortion should be any specific come to any specific conclusion. He's actually doing what you're arguing for. He is treating his materials like a musician treats music. Right.

[Derek Barris]

But he's still putting God. He's still putting God in a role as if it's something real.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't know how you can substantiate that. I mean, he's quoting, he's quoting literature in the same way that your Catholic priest would have had to use the word God to talk about the story that he was talking about. Right.

[Kristen Bell]

Why is he choosing this particular literature?

[Dax Shepard]

Well, because that's where he's coming from and that's who he speaks to. And if you want to know, I mean, from my perspective, why is this appealing and who would it, who would it appeal to? I mean, because you guys are also very much pragmatic with regard to building coalitions.

[Matthew Remsky]

Big tent.

[Dax Shepard]

Building coalitions in big tent. Right. Like think of the 17 year old girl in a red state who grew up in a sexually repressive church but has heard about consent culture on the Internet. And now Talarico brings these two things together for her in a way that feels digestible and unthreatening because he looks like a choir boy. I'm thinking about, do you remember Jeremiah, who I interviewed along with Julia of the sex Evangelicals podcast? Totally Talarico. I think for him, like if you think of him as a younger boy, remember his story a little bit. Could model a different type of like receptive listening masculinity, who's depicting a gentler interaction with God and that might have let him relax a little bit earlier in his life from the burden of all of this premature responsibility that turns Christian nationalists into self armoring assholes. So. So I mean, I just see this guy as doing exactly what the person who taught Bible as literature in my college experience, Northrop Fry, did, which is like, these are the stories that we work with. And I'm going to bring new meaning to this particular story for this audience who's already familiar with it, because the story goes through millions of iterations over and over again. I also don't know what you mean by metaphysics either because, because he's, because he's really just talking about the story, the story that's in the book.

[Derek Barris]

Well, the metaphysics is easy. He thinks there's this thing called God which is an all powerful being that is talking to a human. That is intervention. But you're being a little disingenuous in your argument because you're not looking at it contextually. You're looking at one paragraph of text we're talking about. Whereas you referenced listening to numerous sermons that he gives at a church in which he is playing the role of a pastor. Like there's that context that, that context matters in this argument.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Derek Barris]

He is not, he is not saying, I am going to step out here and use this as a metaphor. Nowhere does he do that. And my problem with it is that for that specific tradition, like I said, I like where he ends up. But he is not talking about anything about the thousands of years since that time of science that we know of the harm that the lack of consent does. He is not talking in a scientific line language whatsoever, which most people who care about the rights of women will include. Like, I'm thinking of Jen Gunter, who talks about it often when you're talking about how women's bodies function. He is using an Iron Age idea of women's bodies here in this situation.

[Dax Shepard]

Contextually, you know, if you want context, you have to actually listen to him because one of the things that he says is that it is not Christian to reject scientific advancement. He's like, he's like Catholics in that realm.

[Derek Barris]

Then why doesn't he talk about it then? He. Nothing that you've brought has talked about it.

[Dax Shepard]

Wait a minute, I just brought three clips. I brought three clips. I'm telling you that I watched more content than you did. And I'm telling you that he's not doing what you think he's doing.

[Derek Barris]

I haven't heard any science of what you've chose.

[Dax Shepard]

That's fine. He's not a scientist. What is that, your purity test? He has to, he has to quote fucking studies or something like that in order for him to make a good point to Christians.

[Derek Barris]

Oh no, it's not a purity test, because if I lived in his district, I would still vote for him even if I didn't agree with him on things. So it's not a purity test.

[Dax Shepard]

Great.

[Kristen Bell]

You can't have it both ways.

[Dax Shepard]

Terrific. Terrific. So why are you making assumptions about his literalism? I don't get it.

[Kristen Bell]

You can't have it both ways. I mean, fair enough. On, like, you've looked into his stuff, he probably does really reference science because he's an educated guy and he's a. He's a worldly guy and he's a political figure. I think part of what I hear, Derek reaching for that, that I think is. Is an important thing to consider is that when someone positions themselves as a literary scholar or as a comparative mythologist, and they say, now I'm going to talk about this myth, and now I'm going to talk about that myth, and I'm going to talk about how we might interpret this and. And situate it within a particular cultural and historical context in terms of what people were thinking about, about how the world works and where they were at in terms of the progress of science. That's what one thing. It's another thing when you are positioning yourself as a Christian, as a pastor, no less, and yes, you're interpreting these stories, but in that role, hovering behind you always is the implication that there is some great spiritual, cosmic, supernatural mystery that is being referred to that has a special kind of authority, especially over how we ought to live morally. And when that is in the realm of politics, Politics, to me, that's usually gone quite badly. I think we can make better arguments for politics and for moral philosophy that don't have to have that particular presence hovering in the background.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I think I would agree with you if what he was pointing to was some sort of belief that there was an ultimate truth that God was going to somehow magically, you know, reveal. But from what I hear, he's in a sort of theological formation and a type of seminary training that is. Is really more engaged in, like, process and liberation theology, which is about, like, figuring out together what these myths, what these stories, what these rituals mean to us. It's like that's. There's a. There's a. There's a differently. You're, you're. You're kind of imputing that this, that this guy, because he's becoming a pastor.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Must be sort of standing in for some sort of authoritarian truth that he's going to be the vessel for. And I just don't see It. I'm just not seeing it.

[Kristen Bell]

When he stands up in front of him of believing Christians, that's exactly what he's doing. And I'm not even giving it the level of authoritarian truth. I'm just saying it's a kind of religious authority that I have problems with. For me, one of the reasons why this one did not land well for me, this particular clip, is that he's referencing the central idea of Christianity, that Jesus was this very special person who is born of a virgin and is the son of God to make me it's it. We're fairly adjacent to the Jordan Peterson conversation where people say to him, do you believe Jesus really rose from the dead? And he refuses to answer directly. It's like either. Either you do or you don't. And whether you do or you don't determines, you know, what your. Where you position these kinds of religious beliefs in your worldview. It's all. You can't have it both ways. Either you say, no, I don't think Jesus was born of a virgin. I don't think he rose from the dead. I don't think he's literally, literally the Son of God. I'm not even sure there really is such a thing as God. But here's the story that I think is really interesting in terms of how we think about human psychology and culture and world mythology and how we try to make sense of the world through these kinds of myths.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. It feels like you're both reading from sort of statement of faith that he's made that I haven't seen. And the reason that I bring up his sermons and any of his quotations at all is that the messaging appeals to me precisely because this is a guy who can obviously engage with a literature and a tradition. Tradition. And make something new out of it, As I said before, like a kind of a music that can be played in a new way. I. I will say that in that vein, he's stretching the text when he suggests that Gabriel asks Mary if this is something she wants to do. There's nothing in the text like that, but the post hoc inference that he needs, that Gabriel needs Mary's affirmation is a very old idea about Mary's consent being essential to the Incarnation. Like, this is all over the ancient literature. All of the early church writers are talking about it, you know, including Augustine. And it's. And it's interesting because, like, Talarico is now pinging the person who's most loved by J.D. vance and Leonard Leo against them, which is delicious. Yeah. The patristic idea is that the human has to say, say yes to the plan. Right. Has to say yes. And it's an extremely important point and it's underlined by aquinas in the 13th century. He goes, if it was necessary that she should be informed in mind concerning him before conceiving him in the flesh, so that she might offer to God the free gift of her obedience, which she proved by saying, behold the handmaid of the Lord. So this is the. Not like it's funny because he actually stretches the scripture, but then he refers back to a very old argument about whether or not participating with this story of, you know, the mythos of God's plan or whatever is something that you can freely participate in or not.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah. I mean, this whole handmade thing I think is very interesting too in terms of the case you're making. Right. It goes back to the Magnificat as well, where basically she's saying, I am just this poor humble person and now I've become the handmaid of the Lord. I am the one who's going to give birth to the Holy One who will change everything. And wouldn't you know it like we, we. We base our calendar from the time that he was supposedly born.

[Dax Shepard]

Right? Yeah. And he grounds that further in the political context of she's an oppressed peasant teenage girl living in poverty under an oppressive empire. As a Jew, this is a little bit resonant for the present day. Right. And then she has a vision from God that she's going to give birth to a baby who's going to do all of these things. He notes that her ascent is symbolically powerful as this kind of ground level response of agency and willpower that authoritarians have banned the recitation of the Magnificat. And I'd heard about this, but I had to go back and look it up. So the details are. Yes. Yeah. The occupying Brits in India ban the Magnificat. Then on the final day of British rule, Gandhi requests it be read whenever the British flag is lowered. In the 1980s, the junta, backed by the US and Guatemala, banned recitation of the Magnificat to quell revolutionary zeal. Same thing happened in Argentina. The junta there banned the Magnificat after the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo used its words in protest against the regime's disappearance of their sons. Yeah. So Talarico is telling Rogan of all knuckleheads about a pivotal moment of anti colonial revelation in ancient Palestine and how it produced a poem about agency and empowerment that was so powerful that a US Backed, you know, military regimes in Latin America suppressed it. And now we can read it as a hymn for women seeking to regain control over their own bodies. Right. So Rogan, I don't know whether he got hip to that, if that's what caught him on fire.

[Kristen Bell]

Well, he is going to church these days in Texas maybe.

[Dax Shepard]

Right? Right. Who knows whose church? I want to know if he's going to Talariqui's church. So he tells him to run for president. It's a pretty whiplash kind of. Kind of scenario for me.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah. I totally get why it appeals to you. And I have a lot of sympathy for many of these strands that you're with weaving together here.