← Offline with Jon Favreau
Offline with Jon Favreau
Peter Thiel's Antichrist, JD Vance's Split with the Pope, and Ross Douthat's Scientific Case for Believing in God
01:17:54
Religion in the US has been on the decline for many years, but does atheism make us unhappier? Ross Douthat, New York Times Opinion columnist and author of Believe, joins Offline to explain why he thinks believing in God is a rational choice, why secular humanism feels worse in the age of Trump, and what he makes of Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance’s recent misanthropic comments on his "Interesting Times" podcast.
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- [00:00]
Jon Favreau
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- [01:41]
Ross Douthit
Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet, and Stephen Fry, the British comedian and public intellectual, are two people who probably agree on almost nothing. But they share a deep love for science fiction writer Douglas Adams, the genius behind the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. My name is Arvind Ethan David and I'm the author of Douglas Adams the Ends of the Earth. In my new audiobook, you'll hear rare.
- [02:12]
Jon Favreau
Recordings from the man who inspired a.
- [02:14]
Ross Douthit
Generation of of futurists, technologists and scientists. You'll hear readings of his visionary work from the voices of those who knew.
- [02:23]
Jon Favreau
And loved him best people like Stephen.
- [02:25]
Ross Douthit
Fry and David Badill. Get Douglas the Ends of the Earth now at Pushkin FM Audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. There are plenty of people who go through an entire life, 80 or 90 years of life, and never have anything super weird happen to them. And I've had friends who read my book and have been like, you know, this is really interesting, but nothing remotely like that has ever happened to me. But stuff like this does happen, in fact, a lot to a lot of people of no religious background in particular. And it just, you want to have a theory of the world that makes room for it because again, it has persisted in secular environments without the church telling you to believe in these things. And it's just part of what it means to be human is that weird shit happens.
- [03:24]
Jon Favreau
I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. I'm here today with Ross Douthit, the New York Times columnist and author of the new book Believe why Everyone Should Be Religious. This is a book that I picked up over the last couple weeks and was very fascinated. So very kind, excited to talk to Ross about it. Ross, welcome to Offline.
- [03:42]
Ross Douthit
Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure.
- [03:44]
Jon Favreau
I'll admit that when I told folks on our team I really want to talk to Ross Douthit about his book on why everyone should be religious. Got a few looks.
- [03:53]
Ross Douthit
They were sold. They were sold. Immediately detected some. The Holy Spirit descended upon them.
- [04:00]
Jon Favreau
I will just briefly tell you and anyone who's listening what I told them. So I was raised Catholic, though my family wasn't especially religious. We go to church on holidays and occasional Sundays where I mostly remember the priests making us feel guilty for not attending church more. That was sort of the main message I got in my.
- [04:23]
Ross Douthit
The standard, the Christmas. The Christmas Day sermon.
- [04:26]
Jon Favreau
Yes, this is my Suburban.
- [04:27]
Ross Douthit
A lot of new faces out there.
- [04:30]
Jon Favreau
This is my suburban Boston Catholic Church experience.
- [04:33]
Ross Douthit
Oh, yeah. Well, so I should have done an accent then. Sorry. Exactly.
- [04:37]
Jon Favreau
But I attended a Jesuit college, Holy Cross, not because it was Jesuit, but because my acceptance letter came with a scholarship. And while I can't credit the Jesuits for making me more religious, they do get credit or maybe blame for making me more political. And I'd go so far as to say that my politics have been heavily influenced by the Jesuit social teaching I was exposed to at Holy Cross. But, you know, in the 20 plus years since graduating, I've drifted away from the Catholic Church and religion in general for many of the reasons you might expect that you've written about. And to be honest, you know, I've never been fully comfortable with that drift. So your book really spoke to me. And I guess I'll just start by asking, did you have people like me in mind when you were writing this book?
- [05:33]
Ross Douthit
As, you know, the subtitle of the book is why Everyone should be Religious. The working subtitle was, you know, why Jon Favreau Should Be Religious.
- [05:41]
Jon Favreau
This is what I figured.
- [05:42]
Ross Douthit
We decided, we decided, you know, to niche, to niche audience, as, you know, as large as your audience is. But yes, I mean, the book is trying to be written, trying to make arguments and sort of, you know, make a case to people who have some kind of loose attachment to religion, who are not vehemently hostile to it, who've had a positive, you know, in the Jesuit tradition kind of experience, maybe in, in your case and. But who have various hurdles that seem really hard to overcome when it comes to actually saying, I'm going to practice Roman Catholicism, you know, or Judaism or Methodism or what, you know, what have you again, and it's trying to remove, you know, remove at least some of those impediments. I think that's the goal.
- [06:37]
Jon Favreau
So you write about the emails you get from people who read your New York Times column and note that more and more of your secular readers seem, quote, unhappy with their unbelief. How do you think we arrived at a moment with so many unhappy unbelievers?
- [06:55]
Ross Douthit
I think it's one. It's a combination of a certain kind of inevitable over promising from some of the people who were the most vehement scourges and critics of religion in the period 10 or 15 years ago when we kind of entered into a new era of secularization in American life. So you can think of the decline of religion in America in the modern era as having two big phases. One immediately after the 1960s and then again starting sometime after September 11th, sometime in the presidency of George W. Bush. Right. And the second period was dominated at least for a little while by the new atheism by figures like Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, many others who just made really full throated frontal attacks on religion and made a lot of, you know, really sort of concrete arguments about how the biggest problems in the early 21st century world, from, you know, radical Islam abroad to sort of ignorant, you know, ignorant fundamentalism at home or something, could just be removed if people stopped believing in mythical flying spaghetti monsters and sky daddies and these kind of things. Right? And I think we've had a nice run of about not quite a generation, but a pretty substantial period of time testing. Is a less religious America a more rational America? Is it a less polarized America? Is it a more optimistic America? Is science held in higher repute now that fewer people go to church? I think we can just look around and say the answer is pretty much no. That the decline of religion in America, maybe it didn't cause some of our present derangements, but it certainly didn't help. So there's that there in the background. Then. I think liberals in particular have, you know, in part because of the kind of deep commitment to politics that you're, you know, you describe as having been instilled in you in your Jesuit education. Right. I think liberalism struggles kind of existentially when the arc of history doesn't seem to be going its way. Right. It's like, well, you know, there's no God. Maybe there's no God, but good news, there is this kind of vision of progress, a sort of unfolding story where, you know, the arc of history bends towards justice and so on. I think that's a fairly commonplace liberal perspective. And it's just harder to sustain in the era of a triumphant Donald Trump and a general climate of political turbulence than it was when Barack Obama was ascending to power. Right.
- [09:46]
Jon Favreau
Yeah.
- [09:47]
Ross Douthit
So I think those are two forces that have made non believers, especially liberal leaning non believers, unhappier than they were. I also think, and this is of course, just what a religious person would say. Right. But I do think that if God exists and human beings are supposed to stand in some kind of relationship to higher powers, cosmic purpose, these kind of things, then you wouldn't expect human civilization to just sort of carry on merrily when those horizons are foreclosed. It doesn't mean that you can't be good or happy without religion. Obviously, people are both good and happy in various situations without believing in God. But in the aggregate, I think human beings pretty clearly benefit from having a sense that moral purpose is actually written into the universe. It's not just something we make up. That the world is not just a sort of tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Even if you get that vibe sometimes, you know, in the Trump era. Right. And no, I think that that reality is more apparent to people maybe in 2025 than it was in 2006 or something.
- [11:10]
Jon Favreau
It's funny you mentioned 2006 and Obama, because when I started working for him, it was when he arrived in the Senate in 2005, in one of the first speeches I worked on with him was this speech at the Call to Renewal conference. It was a speech about faith. And he had just written the chapter, his chapter on faith for Audacity of Hope. And so we sort of turned that into a speech. So it was mostly his writing. But I remember him writing this passage still that, you know, where he talks about how people are going about their daily lives, going to work, busy, and yet they're still feeling like there is this hole at the center of their lives and that there's something missing. And talking about this, like, sort of desire for, you know, in this world of modernity and busyness and where we're just sort of rushing around, like, are we missing something that grounds us just like our individual selves? Right. Not even forget about the politics of all of it. And I do think that, at least for me and a lot of people I've talked to, I think especially in the last couple years, there has been this. I think technology plays into this. I think sort of just the lack of faith in institutions all over the place plays into this. But people do feel this something missing. I get that part more, too.
- [12:34]
Ross Douthit
Yeah. I think, you know, I think Obama himself was quite good at trying to always connect his arc of history vision to some kind of religious perspective. I think a lot of people, especially younger people on the left who came up as admirers of Obama were more likely to just sort of take the arc of history. Right. And say, all right, you know, well, he's a politician. He has to be religious or say he's religious, but we can leave that out. And that, again, that works, I think, when you're in an optimistic phase of liberalism. But I think we have not been in an optimistic phase of liberalism, I mean, really, since like 2013. I think it starts before Trump. You have this kind of disappointment on the left with the fact that Obama did not usher in a post racial utopia. And that then interacts with populism and just. Yeah. Creates a landscape where the immediate and secular is. It's not delivering cosmic hope all the time. Right, right. And people like. People like cosmic hope. I think.
- [13:42]
Jon Favreau
Yeah. I mean, so there's basically two parts to your argument. The first is that it's rational to believe in God. The second is that if you do believe God exists, it's rational to then choose and join and practice a religion, preferably one of the major faith traditions. Let's start with the first part. Why is it rational to believe in a higher power?
- [14:04]
Ross Douthit
Because the world, as it presents itself to us Gives a lot of converging lines of evidence that make more sense and make sense of one another. If there's some kind of mind or purpose behind the cosmos, I don't think there's one. You know, there's an endless list of arguments for and against the existence of God. I don't think that there's one slam dunk argument where you open, you know, you open Thomas Aquinas and you pick his third reason to believe in God and you're like, that's it, we've settled the debate. And if there were such an argument, I'm not philosophically minded enough to make it. I think it's more that you start with basically what to date science has revealed and indicated about the nature of the universe, which is that it is a remarkably law bound, mathematically beautiful construct that has all of these features that we've only sort of figured out in the last couple of generations that look incredibly fine tuned to produce our kind of galaxy, our kind of universe, stars, planets, carbon based life forms, us. And the odds of this kind of universe emerging by happenstance again, as far as people can tell, are exceptionally large. Not like one in a thousand, but like one in a quadrillion, quadrillion. Which is why sort of at a modern sort of non religious scientific explanations for this reality have tended to default to the idea that there must be a multiverse and there must actually be a quadrillion universes that we can't see or touch or reach. But that explain why how you could get one particularly like ours. I think already at that point you're in a zone that's quite different from what other lot of people think of as the traditional faith science clash, where the non believers are presenting the rigorous laboratory data and the religious believers are offering just speculation. I think the multiverse is itself highly speculative, right. So at the very least there's a kind of clash of speculations going on where it's not at all clear to me that one creative power is more implausible than this sort of infinity of universes we can't see. Then I think you move to the nature of our consciousness and not just the mystery of what consciousness is and how it works, which is sort of a point of bafflement or limitation for materialist accounts of reality, but also just the fact that our consciousness, our intellect, our understanding can get all the way from very basic forms of reasoning, rudimentary things that you would maybe expect, you know, a, a sort of early hominid to find useful in survival all the Way up to grasping the complexities of theoretical physics. Splitting the atom now rewriting our own genetic code. All of this stuff. There's a kind of excess in human capacity that seems to match pretty well with the evidence for a kind of structuring mind. At the beginning of things, our minds seem to be fitted into a kind of over, you know, whatever overarching power is there. And then finally, and this is where it gets weirder and, you know, I lose some people, right? You have the remarkable persistence of mystical and supernatural and religious experience under officially disenchanted conditions in landscapes where most people are not raised to believe in that stuff as sort of a persistent feature of human life. And yet it recurs and reappears. People have religious and mystical experiences who are not religious in the slightest. They fall on people unbidden. You have forms of spiritual mystical experience like near death experiences, which are quite peculiar indeed that we know more about under modern scientific conditions. They don't just sort of evaporate under the, you know, under the light of scientific scrutiny. In fact, you know, if you bring more people back from the brink of death, you get a lot more hard to explain supernatural experiences. So I think that that reality is also how you get from the idea that there might be a God to the idea that this God might actually be interested in what we do and some kind of relationship with us, which is obviously important to going from a kind of abstract belief in, like, God as a clockmaker who just sets things in motion to God as a person who might, you know, might be interested in your prayers, might care about your, you know, how you donate to charity or, you know, how you raise your kids or who you sleep with for that matter. Which is obviously very important to getting someone into, you know, into a synagogue or mosque or church. Because if God is just sort of a mathematical abstraction, then the case for practice gets a lot weaker. But I think those lines converge on, again, a very basic religious understanding of the world. And you can explain all of them without a belief in God, but you have to come up with a whole set of distinct explanations. You need the infinite multiverse to explain the laws of physics.
- [19:29]
Jon Favreau
Or the simulation. We're all in a simulation.
- [19:31]
Ross Douthit
Or the simulation. Well, the simulation hypothesis, though, just punts, right? The simulation hypothesis is basically not to get too in the weeds, but it is basically like 2nd century A.D. gnosticism. It's like, okay, we're all prisoners of these, like second secondary gods who are, you know, Silicon Valley bros in some, you know, impossibly infinite, infinite Constellation. But even there, if you convinced me the universe was a simulation and that we were all being created by Sam Altman. Sam Altman, version 8.0. Right. I would still, you know, one, you still ask, well, where did Sam Altman come from? And then, then you really are looking to God. You're like, God, you gotta. You gotta get me out of. Gotta get me out of. Sam Altman's 347 trillionth simulation.
- [20:24]
Jon Favreau
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- [21:04]
Ross Douthit
Now, John, thank you for sharing all.
- [21:05]
Jon Favreau
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- [22:46]
Ross Douthit
Oh, yeah, yeah. No, well, that's the other thing, right? Like, people. People who. I mean, there's been sort of some lags in when people have kids. There's sort of. There's. I think a lot of people have ended up confronting those kind of questions from their kids a little later in life. And. No, I mean, that's. I mean, that's the. You know, one of the things I try very hard in the book not to do is to just make a kind of pragmatic case for religion where it's like, maybe there's no God, but you should act like there is because it makes life easier. But it is certainly the case, right, that children confront you very directly with fundamental questions that adults are more comfortable sort of putting in the back of their mind while they go out and, you know, create podcasts and so on. And there is something extremely useful about being able to say with some degree of conviction, you know, we don't know everything, but, you know, someone is in charge of the universe, and when you. When you die, you'll be held accountable for the good and bad choices you make and so on like that. I have a number of children, and I'm very grateful. I'm not really running a major indoctrination academy for them. They go to mass. It's baptized and confirmed, but they have questions, and it's good to have some answers.
- [24:07]
Jon Favreau
Yeah. And it's interesting because I found the scientific case for religion that you lay out in the book quite compelling. And I read it after I was faced with these questions from my son Charlie. But it's interesting because I basically landed where you do in the book, not as eloquently, but when I was a kid and I asked those questions because I was raised Catholic, the answers were, there is a God, and this is heaven and hell and all the rest of it. And then as I grew up, you know, you sort of hear about, like, evolution, and then you hear about the Big Bang theory and all this. And so Charlie's asking all about the universe and the Big Bang theory because he's like, what created the solar system? What created the galaxy?
- [24:55]
Ross Douthit
Then?
- [24:55]
Jon Favreau
Well, then what happened with the universe? And I was like, the Big Bang Theory. He's like, well, how did the Big Bang theory start? And I was like, well, you know what? We don't know, actually. And there is. People believe that there could be a higher power, a God. When we say God, that's what we mean. That could have created that could have, you know, facilitated the Big Bang and everything else. And he sort of sits there and is, like, thinking about it for a second, but he's like, yeah, yeah, I guess that makes sense. Because you do. I mean, it's just common sense that you get to a point in the scientific explanation of the cosmos and as you write our consciousness where science can tell you a lot, but it just, it always stops short of explaining, like the little. The little magic dust there that sort of starts the architect, as you say, that sort of creates the whole thing, right?
- [25:41]
Ross Douthit
And I mean, I taught a class actually at Yale with a friend who's an atheist philosopher who has forgotten more about philosophical argumentation than I will ever know. But it was sort of on these arguments and on these sort of competing explanations. And his view was basically that it's okay to get back to a set of equations, right? If you can reduce it to a set of equations, there isn't, per se, a reason to say it's better to have God than to just sort of say, oh, well, there's this brute fact of these equations operating on, you know, not. Not even material reality, but, you know, whatever precedes material reality. And I don't find that satisfying. But I think. I don't find it satisfying in part because I think I'm okay with the idea that mind as a thing has some kind of existence in its own right. You know, we have exposure to two kinds of things as human beings, mind and matter. And we experience mind through our own mind and then through, obviously, the communications that we can make in conversation or books and so on with other minds, and then we experience matters. And the atheistic default basically assumes that at the end of the day, matter is what is real because we can measure it, right? We can dissect it. Now, what matter fundamentally is is itself an interesting philosophical question, but that's sort of the default. And to be religious at the end, like, you know, if you listen to Richard Dawkins, he would respond to your. Your response to your son. You say, well, some people think in the end there's, you know, there's some kind of mind setting it all in motion. And Dawkins would say, ah, but, you know, then your son should ask, you know, what is that mind made of? Right? Like, you know, and where. Where does. Where does it come from? And it's an infinite regress and so on. And I think that. That if you think of mind as something that is cobbled together from atoms, then, yes, that, you know, you are in a sort of state of. It's like, well, the mind, the mind of God has to be complex in the way that we understand, you know, atoms and quarks and everything else to be. But I think the religious perspective is that, you know, actually, no, mind could be something. Mind could be simpler than we think and still quite fundamental. And that's what we talk about when we talk about God. We're not talking about a being who is like, constructed of the stuff of the universe. We're talking about a being who has something in common with consciousness as we experience it. But that is admittedly outside of the box of current secular thinking.
- [28:30]
Jon Favreau
Yeah, right. So you mentioned the sort of the persistence of miracles and supernatural encounters, near death experiences. I have desperately wanted to believe in an afterlife since I was a kid. And I spent like a sleepless year maybe terrified about what happens after we die, as some kids do. And I think I still do believe in an afterlife. But I also wonder if, and always catch myself, like, is this my brain engaging in the kind of motivated reasoning and wish casting that our brains tend to do when confronted with existential angst about what happens to us? And, you know, I've always wondered if sort of the most obvious explanation for some of these near death experiences and visions is that kind of our brains doing that. And I know people who are not religious at all that after a loved one passed away, had a vision, had sort of one of these experiences, people that I never would have expected, people that, you know, I mean, I had a close friend pass away when I was in high school and. And her mother, who was upset with the Catholic church and had sort of fallen out with the church and wasn't religious, like, had this experience right after her daughter died that was incredibly hard to explain. And, you know, for all these years I've thought about that and I'm like, it sounds like I want to believe that that's exactly what happened. And then I'm like, I wonder if deep in the consciousness of her own mind, she just wanted that to happen. You know, I can't. It's tough to tell.
- [30:11]
Ross Douthit
I think people underestimate how commonplace those kind of experiences are because they are not part of the formal, you know, educated elite scripts of American culture. I think people, including people who have those experiences, people will be like, well, something totally bizarre happened to me. But, you know, of course this doesn't normally happen. And I think if you read about, like, you know, not just sort of accounts of people who have had loved ones pass, but accounts of people who work in hospices, for instance, who are sort of around dying people all the time. There is a lot of raw, sort of raw material of human experience right before you get to literal near death experiences that a pretty straightforward reading of it is that, you know, death is not the end and people have that. There's sort of a liminal zone. And when people die, people have experienced people close to them or around them have experiences of stuff sort of effectively crossing the liminal zone. Now, is that potentially, as you say, the result of like, you know, the human mind is really intent on not dying, Right. We have a pretty strong Darwinian incentive to want ourselves to continue and just a basic human incentive to want our loved ones to still. To still be around. And I think there's some segment of that material that is, you know, sort of could be explained in those terms or in terms of, you know, sort of hallucinations that you might have, you know, as your mind is, you know, as you're approaching the threshold of death. Right. Like people seeing dead relatives when they're in the last week of life, which is a very, very common thing. I do think the scale of these things among people who do not hallucinate under normal conditions. One of the books that I quote in, my own book uses the term hallucinations of the sane to describe this. This a lot of these phenomena. It's like people who are not mentally ill or not schizophrenic are not prone to any kind of experiences, having these very discrete experiences that cluster around death and so on, right. I think you need a little bit more than just wishful thinking to get to that. You need some sort of like brain hallucination generation module that we've evolved, right? Okay, so maybe and then when you get to near death experiences themselves where people, you know, die, are sort of clinically dead and are resuscitated there, I think the evolutionary explanation gets pretty challenging to make because these are people who especially in like the prehistoric past would have just died, right? Like, it's not like there were hundreds and thousands of people in, you know, our prehistoric African environment who were, you know, who were dying outright, having their hearts stopped and then coming back to life to tell their stories, right? Like, that was just much, much rarer. You know, it happened occasionally. But you. The there, there is. The experiences that we're talking about are these incredibly rich, detailed experiences that are not described as being like dreams or hallucinations. They're described as more real than real. They tend to be associated with dramatic Changes in people's life, perspectives after. After this experience. People, you know, certainly report big shifts in worldview and theological perspectives based on this stuff. And so an evolutionary explanation has to be like, well, it was advantageous for people to have these experiences, even though they never would have reported them to anyone for. Because, you know, someday far in the future, we'd start resuscitating more people, and then people would want to believe. I don't know. It's hard. It's not. Again, as with all this stuff, I would not say that you cannot come up with a materialist explanation for these things. One argument is that people only have them when they're already revived, that the brain reconstructs it after you've already been revived. Maybe that's how you get to an evolutionary explanation. So people who die don't have these experiences. It's only once you've been brought back that the brain is like, all right, I've got to retrofit this, maybe. But I think there is a. Put it this way, it's really easy to imagine a world without any of these things, right? Like, you can pretty easily imagine a nice materialist cosmos, all just, you know, atoms whirling around. Consciousness is basically an illusion stapled onto people for some evolutionary reason. And, you know, you start resuscitating people from the dead, and because there's nothing there, nobody reports anything, right? None of these things exist, or people come back and they're like, yeah, I had a crazy hallucination about a guy on a unicycle and my dead mother and so on. That's a really easy world to imagine. And if we lived in that world, Richard Dawkins and everyone like him would have a really strong point against religious weirdos like myself. But since we're in this world, I think the religious weirdos get to at least say, hey, you gotta give us a point here, right? Like, if it was 1875 and we were saying, all right, in the next 150 years, we're gonna get a lot better at bringing people back from the dead, what do you expect to happen? The religious expectation would be at least somewhat more vindicated than a strict atheist perspective has been.
- [35:56]
Jon Favreau
I thought that the story you write about in the book about Michael Shermer was quite telling just because that. I think the strongest evidence comes from sort of people who are non believers or atheists who have these experience, and he's one of them. Can you sort of tell that story quickly?
- [36:16]
Ross Douthit
Yeah. Michael Shermer is a very smart debunker. Of the supernatural. You know, a sort of atheist polemicist in the style of Dawkins and others. Very smart guy and very intellectually honest, as far as I could tell, as I can tell from reading his work. Like, he, you know, will concede points to the other side when it seems appropriate to him and so on. And he had this experience when he got married where his wife, then fiance, had a radio that had been a gift. I may mangle the details, but I believe it was from either an uncle or a grandparent who had played some crucial role in raising her in Germany and then passed away and left her this. This radio that was just broken. It was like an heirloom. Nice thing to have. Didn't work. Shermer could never get it to work. They stuck it in a drawer in a back room and forgot about it. And then on their wedding day, they come back to the house and she's feeling sad. Cause they got married in California, and it's all his family and friends, and she doesn't have any family there. And suddenly they hear music coming from the back of the house. And they go back and open the drawer and there's the radio, which never worked before, playing love songs. And it plays throughout the wedding reception. And I think it switches to a different kind of music at some point as appropriate to the evening. And then it stops and never works again. And Shermer is like, this is a really. I'm trying to be a scrupulous, rigorous guy. This was a pretty weird thing that happened. And, you know, and again, he's talked about. He's written about it a couple times. He hasn't sort of concealed it. And he, you know, he. At one point, he tries. You've seen Interstellar, right? So Interstellar, the Christopher Nolan movie, has this, you know, this idea of, like, you know, I forget exactly how it works. Wormholes or, you know, people in different dimensions communicating with each other. And, you know, Matthew McConaughey and his daughter. And so Shermer is like, well, from a materialist perspective, maybe there is a multiverse. And in some other version of the multiverse, my wife's relative found a way to communicate his love to our version of the multiverse. And my view is that once you're making that argument, you should just say, there's probably a God. But that's. Yeah. And again, the reality is that there are plenty of people who go through an entire life, 80 or 90 years of life, and never have anything super weird happen to them. And I've had friends who read my book and have been like, you know, this is really interesting, but nothing remotely like that has ever happened to me. But stuff like this does happen, in fact a lot to a lot of people of no religious background in particular. And it just you want to have a theory of the world that makes room for it because again, it has persisted in secular environments without the church telling you to believe in these things. And it's just part of what it means to be human is that weird shit happens.
- [39:27]
Jon Favreau
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- [40:10]
Ross Douthit
How about that?
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Jon Favreau
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- [41:52]
Ross Douthit
I think those are separate questions. I think that demons tend to. When people have an experience, because people have supernatural experiences that are not just a nice radio playing at your wedding kind of thing. People have. People have some dark, weird, dark experiences. And when people have experiences like that or know someone who've had an experience like that, they. That. That I think is often a push toward religion. It's like, okay, if this. If something spiritual and negative. Negative entities is how. Like, if you read the psychedelic literature, people will talk about encounters with negative entities. What should I do when I have an encounter with a negative entity? And I think it's natural if that happens. Not everyone does it. But to say, hey, you know, maybe I should go to church. Maybe, you know, maybe the Catholic priest has a little. A little advice to give here. Hell is different. There's a difference between believing that there might be malign spiritual entities out there and believing in eternal damnation. And you can believe in one without the other, right? You can think that in the end, you know, hell is empty, even the demons are reconciled, but also think that, you know, right now they exist. But yes, I think that the idea of punishment, and especially eternal punishment, there is a sense of relief that people feel, especially people raised in a religion where that's a really strong point of emphasis, that feel in putting that aside. And you can see this in, you know, the great anthem of the modern age, right? John Lennon's Imagine is a song that, to me, as a religious person, I always listen to it. I'm like, what the hell is he talking about? This is not. It's like, why is it great if there's no heaven? Why is it great if above us is only sky? This sucks, man. But. But clearly there is a sense. There's like a weight that some people feel taken off them by the idea that, like, in the end, you know, your choices are not that significant. If you've, you know, if you fuck up your whole life, it's bad for you, but, you know, you'll die and the story will not have to continue. You won't have to carry, you know, your chains, like Jacob Marley. Right. All the way through eternity. And, you know, look, I am not. What are the terms here? I'm not a universalist. I think that it makes, you know, given. Given the religious premises I hold, you shouldn't assume that nobody goes to hell. At the same time, it is really hard for me to believe, as a, you know, nice modern person raised in. Raised in liberal environments and so on, that. That, you know, there's. There's this kind. There's, you know, that like, 80% of human beings go to hell or, you know, the kind of things that are associated with certain forms of Christianity. So I sort of move back and forth between views on how far to go with that. But, yes, people. Some people find a kind of relief in the idea that nobody is watching them and judging them. Definitely. Yeah.
- [45:13]
Jon Favreau
And it's also. And you've talked about how you don't believe that. That God is a. Is tricking us. Right, Right. And so, because I always think I'm. I remember growing up thinking. And so I was raised Catholic, but my mom was. My mom's Greek Orthodox and which obviously, like, similar. But I. I have these memories of.
- [45:33]
Ross Douthit
Sitting in church, importantly, different important differences, too.
- [45:35]
Jon Favreau
And I remember sitting in church and like, you know, my dad and my brother and I would go up and get communion, and then she'd just be sitting in the. In the pews. And I remember, like, reading the little thing in church that was like, you know, we welcome everyone, and someday we hope that we'd be reunited with our Protestant branches and Orthodox branches, but for now, we're not. And for other religions, you know, it's like a very heart. And I'm like, well, wait a minute. If someone has the misfortune, then in this, in the Catholic telling of being born, where they're not exposed to Catholicism or Christianity but are exposed to some other religion or no religion at all, like, are they. Are they damned for all eternity just because they were just born in the wrong place? Like, that can't be. That can't be what God wants. Right, Right.
- [46:20]
Ross Douthit
And I mean, this is. And this is where I am, you know, in the standards of religious debates notwithstanding. Being a conservative, I am a liberal. Right. I think that that can't if there is eternal damnation, that can't be the reason that, that people, that people go to hell. Yeah, right. It can't be bad luck. Sucks to be you. You were born in Central asia, you know, 400 years before Christ, and there just wasn't, you know, there. And there is a reason, I think, that Christianity has tended to kind of polarize on this issue into, you know, into kind of the kind of Calvinist camp which just sort of bites the bullet and says, yeah, some people go to hell because of things that seem beyond their control because that's, you know, that's what God decided from the start. Right. And there is an internal logic to that that sort of matches with the world, but I think doesn't match with my understanding of who God would have to be for him to be worthy of worship. But that's, you know, it's a lively, it's a lively debate inside Christianity for a reason. But generally, yeah, my, my assumption is that, you know, people are given a certain kind of raw material to work with in their life and how they are, how they relate to God and what happens to their soul is connected with what they do with what they are given. Right. And doesn't mean you can't do something very bad and end up in a very bad place. But it's not going to be as simple as, you know, you failed to hear the altar call at the particular moment, and that's it for you.
- [48:07]
Jon Favreau
This is somewhat related, but slightly different. One thing I hear from a lot of friends who aren't religious is how could a good and just and merciful God allow so much suffering in the world?
- [48:20]
Ross Douthit
Yes. You know, it's a very good question.
- [48:22]
Jon Favreau
And we, you know, just like I thought about it this week, like, how could, how could a just merciful God allow all those suffering, those girls at a Christian camp in Texas, you know, to. To drown? And it certainly seems like a rational doubt to have. I, I've heard it over the years. What, what do you think about that?
- [48:41]
Ross Douthit
I think it's a completely rational doubt to have about the nature of God. I think that it is. I think the arguments for the existence of God and some kind of God as making sense of the cosmos that we find ourselves in are strong enough that confronted with the problem of evil, you should not become an atheist. But you could reasonably say, well, I'm skeptical when Christians say this, God is all good in the way we understand goodness. Right. And I think that, again, Christianity and Judaism and other religions, but Christianity and Judaism are the Religions I know best basically encourage a kind of running argument with God about exactly this point, right? That, you know, the Old Testament is replete with moments where not just Job, but, you know, Abraham and others are basically saying to God, you know, are you sure about this? Like, this seems like. This seems like it can't be right. Can't you be a little more merciful here? And then you get to the New Testament and you have, you know, Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane about to be crucified. And he's not like, awesome God, good plan. You know, we're gonna. This is all. This is all gonna work out great. When we save everybody. He's like, oh, are you sure you can't take this cup from my lips? Look, I'm weeping tears of blood, right? Or sweating blood. I don't want to mess up the scripture, but I think generally religious people, at least in the traditions I know best, are encouraged not to sort of treat the problem of evil as a reason to disbelieve in God, but to treat the problem of evil as a serious problem and a serious question and something that has to have an answer that is more than just like, you know, a kind of mathematical proof. And I guess this is, in the end, my own specific part of my own specific attraction to Christianity, right? Which is the idea that you're not just saying, okay, look, we know God is good because he needed to have free will. And to have free will, you have to have the possibility of bad things happening. And so when you, you know, when you do the math, you've got to have a certain number of, you know, campers die in order to have a world with free will. Now, that might be true, but that is not a satisfying answer. Certainly not a satisfying answer to anyone who is going through tremendous suffering, whether it's losing a child or anything else, right? And so to that, Christianity says something which is not a mathematical proof. It says suffering is real and it can be terrible. And God himself knows how real and terrible it is because he has entered into it and shared it with us. And what the crucifixion and resurrection shows is that suffering can be transformed into something that redeems it. And that. I mean, even that is a. I would not say that. You know, I think when you're confronted with someone whose child was just swept away in a flood, you don't even. You don't say that either. You just. You are there and you bear witness and you try and help them. You don't. One thing the Bible is very against. In the book of Job is anyone who shows up when someone is suffering and says, let me explain to you what God was doing here. I think that is very clearly not what you're supposed to do. But I do think the idea of a God who enters creation, who is not just sort of a puppet master outside, but who enters creation and participates and so on, is again, not a mathematical proof answer, but is a kind of answer to that challenge. But it certainly doesn't go away. Like, there are, you know, there are a lot of. One of. One of the things I would say in making an argument like the one I make in this book is there are a lot of hard arguments about religion that don't disappear just because you believe in God. And that extends. It's not just about the problem of evil. It's all, you know, all of the culture war debates. You know, should the church in the Catholic context, like, you know, should the church allow married priests? You know, should it bless gay couples? None of these debates, like, disappear or are magically resolved. If you just start to believe in God, the debates just continue. And some of them are not resolvable. You know, theological debates do not just go away. Right. But they're having those debates inside a shared consensus that probably God exists. That's what I'm urging people to do, I guess.
- [53:22]
Jon Favreau
I mean. Well, so now we're into the second part of your argument in the book, which is, okay, so if you're willing to believe that there is a God, that God exists, that there's a higher power, you know, you should. It's rational to choose a religion to practice. And, you know, it's a. It's a good bet to choose one of the major world religions that have stood the test of time over thousands of years. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism. So, and this is where. So this is where my struggle comes in. Because, you know, and I, and you talk about in the book why you became Catholic, and, you know, I hadn't actually realized you mentioned some of the historical documentation of Jesus's life and the Gospels. And again, compelling. My struggle is like, let's say you fully believe the Gospels represent the clearest roadmap from God as to how we should live. You know, even within Christianity, as you were just mentioning, like, different interpretations of the Gospel by different people over time have led to, like, entire new branches of the religion. And at some level, these interpretations are subjective because they are made by humans with all of our faults and sins, and they have also evolved over time. So how does being a good Christian or a good Catholic require us to obey the particular edicts of a fundamentally human institution if many of those edicts aren't explicitly spelled out in the New Testament?
- [54:57]
Ross Douthit
Well, I mean, first of all, you, you know, you're a citizen of the United States of America in the 21st century. It is very unlikely that any branch of Christianity that you join and practice, you know, set aside some like, cult like phenomena, Right. Is going to enforce its edicts in your life in a way that sort of takes away your sense of sort of freedom and your own personal judgment. Right, right. So you, you, you know, if you look at your own Catholic, you know, your own Catholic background and you say, look, man, I feel like I'm never going to agree with the church, with church teaching about these six issues or something. And you start going to Mass again and, you know, going to confession and confessing your sins and all of these things. Like, yeah, you know, at some point you might have a priest who takes you aside and it's like, I saw the podcast the other day, you know, we gotta have a conversation about that. Right. But, you know, American Catholicism is a pretty big and diverse, internally diverse church. And I don't think it's. I think that it offers at the very least, a fair amount of space for people who have that kind of reaction that you're having. Right. Of like, look, I can't. And I have this, you know, I'm more conservative than you are, right. To put, you know, and I am a conservative Catholic in terms of the church's internal debates. I wrote a whole book, God help me, you know, criticizing Pope Francis. I'm not sure why I did that. Very unwise.
- [56:38]
Jon Favreau
My favorite Jesuit.
- [56:39]
Ross Douthit
Yeah, exactly. Your favorite Jesuit. Right. But I have, you know, in part because of the debates of the Francis era, I feel like I have a pretty strong sense of the uncertainties and contingent areas in church teaching. And the way that, you know, what the church said about lending money at interest in 1620 sure seems different from how the church talks about, like, you know, your home mortgage in 2025. Right. Like there, you know, it's not just the sex debates. There are a bunch of places where, you know, church teaching seems to have some ruptures and some departures in it. Right. And to live inside Catholicism as a Catholic for me is to basically assume that, look, the reason to be Catholic is, you know, there are these areas of uncertainty, but there are these big things that go all the way back to the New Testament that the church does seem to have really impressively carried on and held onto through total civilizational changes, right? Like feudalism goes away, the Roman Empire goes away, and the Church. There's a bunch of basic things the church is still doing that also do seem to trace back not just to the first century, but generally to the early Church and then too. And I know this makes, you know, makes, you know, it sounds like this weird numbers game brag, but like, if you think that there is a God of history who's interested in the fate of human beings and the fact that Catholicism has been the biggest and most influential form of Christianity, again, unless you think God is really just messing even with his favorite people, then there's something significant going on in there. And just to take the example of your mother, you said your mother was Eastern Orthodox, right? So, like, you know, when Pope Francis did a few things that I disagreed with, I had friends who were like, well, I guess you should just go, you know, become Orthodox, right? Join one of the Orthodox churches. And my view is basically like, you know, I'm a Christian in the Western world, I'm a Christian in the United States. All of my sort of attachments are to Western Europe. Even from an Orthodox Christian perspective, it sure seems like the Pope is, you know, he's the Bishop of Rome and the Patriarch of the West. This is, you know, this is. Even if there is some other form of Christianity that, you know, that turns out to carry on the legacy of the apostles too, Roman Catholicism in the United States seems like a pretty secure place to stay because it does have really strong connections all the way back to the beginning and really has maintained and sustained what I consider core elements of Christian faith. And so even a conservative like me can end up taking this kind of mixture of liberal and conservative perspectives, but end up feeling like, you know, a big global expression of Christianity with deep historical roots is going to be a good place to be.
- [59:56]
Jon Favreau
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Ross Douthit
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Jon Favreau
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Ross Douthit
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- [61:39]
Jon Favreau
I've avoided talking too much about sort of the intersection of religion and politics because you and I could do a whole separate episode on that. But I kind of want to get at it this way. Which is your, your interview with, with J.D. vance at, in Rome in, in late May. And you know, you basically ask, you know, how, how his religion influences politics and specifically the clear sort of disagreement between the Vatican and the White House on deportation policy. And you know, to be fair, he acknowledges that he's trying to weigh the dignity and rights of immigrants as he's making these decisions. But then he, you know, justifies their policies by talking about migrants disrupting social cohesion. And you know, it talks about immigrant communities that have gotten used to pre modern brutality, which you pressed him on for statistics and evidence and you know, he suggested there are unreported crimes. Looking back, like what, what did you make of J.D. vance's answers to that question and your other questions about like his faith shaping his politics?
- [62:50]
Ross Douthit
I mean, I guess one, and this isn't specific to the vice president. Right. But I, I think we had, you know, there's people on the conservative side of Things in Catholic debates. Right. For a long time have had the idea that liberal Catholics tend to be cafeteria Catholics, is the phrase. Right. Sort of picking and choosing and saying we're not, you know, well, abortion, that, that would, you know, we're going to be pro choice, even though the church says you can't be a good Catholic and be pro choice. But look, we've got these nice, this nice support for Catholic social teaching over here, Right. And I think that on the one hand, I think that I agree with that critique. Like, I think, you know, Mario Cuomo's position on abortion was wrong and not a solid expression of his Catholic faith. But I think it's pretty clear that pull exists on the political right. And it's a little more complicated on issues like immigration because unlike with abortion, the church doesn't sort of, it doesn't offer this kind of very concrete roadmap. On abortion, the church says, look, abortion is a form of murder, and you can have some compromises here and there, but basically you're trying to make it be against the law or you should. On immigration, the church says, look, you've got to treat migrants with respect and dignity. But states have a right to, you know, patrol and police their own borders. There can be some balance here. And in that, I think. I think Republican politicians right now feel like they have Republican Catholics, I mean, feel like they have a lot of wiggle room. But in practice, right. When it comes to sort of specific concrete cases, and the ones I pressed the vice president on have to do with deportations to El Salvador, I think, basically, it's pretty clear that Trump administration deportation policy is violating sort of a Catholic view of the natural law. And I think the pressures of politics are such that a lot of Republican politicians just who are Catholic, who are sincere Christians, just don't want to sort of look, look that in the face. Right. They want to pull back to the abstract question, should a Catholic politician be willing to police the U.S. border?
- [65:23]
Jon Favreau
Right.
- [65:23]
Ross Douthit
Yes. Which is sort of like that.
- [65:25]
Jon Favreau
But that's sort of like, yes, of course.
- [65:28]
Ross Douthit
Well, well, well, no, I mean, I don't think it's a yes, of course, given exactly where. I mean, this is a separate argument, but where liberalism and the left ended up in their view of borders in some ways over the last five years. Right. And I think there are people on the Catholic left and some Catholic bishops who go too far in suggesting that, you know, all deportation is contrary to Catholic teaching, that that can't be right. But once you set in motion a machine of Deportation, then as a Catholic, you have a really strong obligation to, to be constantly scrutinizing it for abuse. And again, in that conversation, Vance, I think we took the particular case, the Garcia case that everyone has focused on, and he offered a particular concrete defense of administration conduct in that case. But, yeah, my view was then, and still is that the administration is correct and conservative Catholics are correct that you can be a good Catholic and support some kind of deportation policy. But there are concrete things that the Trump administration has done and intends to continue doing that the church should criticize.
- [66:45]
Jon Favreau
Yeah. I mean, and the criticism you hear from the bishops and cardinals today are not necessarily related. And some of them qualify the criticism by saying, of course we have the right to patrol, politicians have the right to patrol our borders and, and, and keep communities safe and all that. But, you know, they're using phrases like inhumane, morally repugnant, incompatible with Catholic teaching.
- [67:09]
Ross Douthit
And I think, I mean, my first.
- [67:12]
Jon Favreau
Before on immigrant, on immigration, like, I know that the Catholic Church has always been more liberal on immigration, but that to me is sort of like a new level of. Yeah, well, forget about the deportations themselves. Like, say you agree that we can have deportations in any country, the treatment of migrants. Right. The, the detention centers, the way that they're being, you know, that kind of all of that part of the deportation regime feels very antithetical to, like, fundamental Catholic social teaching.
- [67:42]
Ross Douthit
Yeah. I think the bishops would benefit by being as concrete as possible in their, in their examples, because I think, I do think there are bishops who, again, who will talk about essentially present any deportation regime as an affront to Catholic teaching. And again, I think that argument, just one. I think it's a political loser with a lot of the people. The bishops themselves are trying to reach, like sort of conservative leaning Catholics who are like, wait, you're gonna tell me that we had a breakdown at the border and millions of people came in and you can only deport them if they murder someone like that. Right. That. I think the, I think if I were, you know, if, if I were pope, Right. If I, if I, if I were a Catholic bishop making this case, I would focus very concretely on where are you deporting people to and with what kind of process. Right. And, you know, deporting someone who, you know, who was, you know, generally law abiding to Mexico, you know, maybe you complain about that, but that's, that's not, I don't think that's the most compelling.
- [68:55]
Jon Favreau
Indefinite intention in a foreign.
- [68:57]
Ross Douthit
No. And this is, this is. Yeah, I think there is just a. Yeah, I think there is just an important distinction here that if you're a Catholic who is criticizing the Trump administration, you have an interest in making. And again, that was why I tried to focus on that particular thing with the vice president. I mean, I think, look, the other thing is, as I said to him then, it's not novel at all for Republican administrations to be in tension with the Vatican. Bush administration was in tension with John Paul II over the Iraq War. And I think John Paul II was right. The Reagan administration was in tension with the Vatican over nuclear weapons and some of its Cold War policies. I think in that case, the Reagan administration was more Right. The church is not, you know, the Church is not perfect in all of its own political judgments either. And it's okay to have to be a Catholic politician and have an argument with the Pope, but you just don't want to. Well, what did I say to Vance? I said, when you're. It's a zone of temptation. And I think that's right. I think if you were. If you're a Catholic politician, and I think this was absolutely true of Biden. Biden, too, that it's like it's you, you, you know, you start out saying, look, you know, the church has these ideals, but I live in the real world. And that's true. Right? Yeah, absolutely. You live in the real world. You have to make choices. But it's really easy for that to become a license for things that, you know, at the beginning, you would never have imagined yourself justifying.
- [70:36]
Jon Favreau
Right. Yeah, no, I was. You know, we're used to it on the. On the left, being intentioned with the Church on certain uncertain issues. But I, It. It's the first time I've noticed, at least since I've been in politics that there's been a. Or maybe the most. Most intense split between the right and the Church over. Over immigration policy, at least here in the United States. So I thought that was. It was notable. I got to ask, just before we go, I gotta ask a question about your interview with Peter Thiel, because, yes, boy, that was a journey. What was more concerning to you? His long pause after you asked if he'd prefer the human race to endure or his suggestion that Greta Thunberg might be the Antichrist.
- [71:24]
Ross Douthit
So, I mean, you know, as, you know, as a podcaster, I'm. I'm very, very happy to have had a conversation with Peter Thiel, and I'm not gonna, you know, I'm not gonna criticize him. I think I would say I was not surprised by his pause after that question because Thiel is someone who has always been a kind of transhumanist, right? Meaning someone who imagines the human race continuing, but in some way where we have changed ourselves. And he has a very heterodox reading of Christianity, where these things are sort of compatible. But, yeah, that pause. I mean, I didn't expect it to go on maybe for quite so long, but I wasn't totally surprised by it. I think, you know, I argued with him in the interview. I think Teal had a really strong diagnosis of things that were deeply wrong in Western Life in the 2000 and tens, that it was basically like that. We thought we were growing really quickly and changing really quickly, but actually we were stagnant and stuck. Technological progress had slowed down. Silicon Valley, where he made his fortune, was under delivering. Right. And then I think, connected to that, he folded that together with kind of, you know, what. What I would call sort of peak woke. Right. This sort of ascent of Thunbergian, you know, a mixture of, you know, Ibram Kendi racial theory and Thunbergian degrowth ideology that I really think was, to me, as a conservative, scarily powerful in the west for a discrete period of time. I don't think. And I made this argument to him that that's. That that sort of way, like, 2025 feels different. It feels like Greta Thunberg is not a central player in the global drama of progressivism. I think whether or not we're really leaving stagnation behind, at least we have some pretty big technological changes happening. And so I'm less sure that the Teal. The Teal view. I don't know. I felt like I was arguing with him and saying, you know, we're in 2025. And a lot of his arguments about what he fears most belonged more to 2019 or 2020. But he has billions of dollars, and I do not. So, you know, I will say, as.
- [73:58]
Jon Favreau
Kooky as I found the Greta Thunberg thing, the transhumanism does scare me as a human also as just a person who, you know, has been religious and maybe would like to be more religious. And I do think, getting back to the politics of it all, it's like one area where probably, you know, religious people on the left and on the right may agree, which is like this. The advancement of AI and this idea that maybe we can, like, generate consciousness in artificial. With artificial intelligence and that maybe we can leave our bodies. And L. You know, Peter Thiel talked a Lot about, like, solving the problem of mortality. And you're like, solving the problem of mortality. What. What are we doing here? And it is.
- [74:39]
Ross Douthit
It.
- [74:40]
Jon Favreau
It is alarming to me that some of the richest and most powerful people in the world sort of have that mindset as they develop technology that we're all going to experience the effects of.
- [74:53]
Ross Douthit
Yes. And I think that there is a. There's a dynamic that. That has defined our politics in the last few years where you've had this tacit alliance of Silicon Valley and cultural conservatism that is based around, again, this sense that there is this kind of common enemy in, you know, in woke progressivism, and that this is sort of, you know, that that progressivism is a threat both to the cultural right and to, you know, Elon Musk and so on. But there is a deep tension that. And honestly, I don't think, like, I don't think Teal is actually the maximal representation of this at all. I think there are other people in Silicon. Like, Teal doesn't think that we're going to upload our consciousness to the cloud. Like when Thiel talks about transhumanism, it's more like we're going to have artificial hearts and solve dementia and these kind of things. Right. But there are lots of people deeply involved with AI, I think, who do think that they're either working towards a full merge of human consciousness and machine consciousness, or that they're creating a successor species for the human race. And that does not seem to me to be fundamentally compatible with my own religious commitments. So, you know, we'll see how those alliances look. And, I mean, one of the things I always appreciated about Musk was that when he talked about going to Mars, he seemed to want to be human beings going to Mars. Right. Not robots. And one of the more depressing features to me of the whole Doge experience was after he lost, he intervened in Wisconsin in the Wisconsin elections and lost. And then he had a tweet the next day. I think that was like, I guess human beings are just the biological bootstrap for digital consciousness. And I was like, man, you lose one election and you give up. Give up on the human race. Come on.
- [76:51]
Jon Favreau
That was it for him.
- [76:52]
Ross Douthit
Yeah.
- [76:53]
Jon Favreau
Ross Douthit, thank you so much for joining. The book is believe everyone should go read it, especially if you're skeptical.
- [76:59]
Ross Douthit
Everyone.
- [77:00]
Jon Favreau
Like, yeah, if you are skeptical of religion, organized religion, the existence of a God, I think it was just a fantastic book to dig into and gives you a lot to think about. So thanks for writing it. And thanks for joining.
- [77:11]
Ross Douthit
Absolutely. Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure.
- [77:13]
Jon Favreau
All right, quick message from our friends at Vote Save America. You guys all know that Republicans just passed one of the cruelest and least popular pieces of legislation in history. It's gonna kick a lot of people off their health care so that we can afford a trillion dollars of tax breaks just for the richest 1% of people in this country. A lot of the House Republicans who voted for the bill won by very slim margins and they're facing tough reelections next year and we can hold them accountable by voting them out and taking back the House. So Vote Save America, as they always do, has the answers here. They set up a Take Back the House fund to support must win House races. And to get more information, you just have to go to votesaveamerica.com House that's votesaveamerica.com House paid for by Vote Save America. You can learn more@votesave America.com this ad has not been authorized by any candidate or candidates committee. Offline is a crooked media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau, along with Max Fisher. The show is produced by Austin Fisher and Emma Ilick Frank Jordan Kanter is our Sound editor. Audio support from Charlotte Landis and Kyle Seglin. Delon Villanueva produces our videos each week. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Ari Schwartz, Madelyn Herringer and Adriene Hill for production support. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America.
- [78:58]
Ross Douthit
Did you know 39% of teen drivers admit to texting while driving. Even scarier, those who text are more likely to speed and run red lights. Shockingly, 94% know it's dangerous, but do it anyway. As a parent, you can't always be in the car, but you can stay connected to their safety with Greenlight Infinity's driving reports. Monitor their driving habits, see if they're using their phone, speeding and more. These reports provide real data for meaningful conversations about safety. Plus, with weekly updates, you can track their progress over time. Help keep your teens safe. Sign up for Greenlight Infinity@Greenlight.com podcast.
- [79:30]
Jon Favreau
This season, let your shoes do the talking.
- [79:33]
Ross Douthit
Designer Shoe Warehouse is packed with fresh.
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Jon Favreau
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Ross Douthit
Without saying a word.
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Jon Favreau
From cool sneakers that look good with everything.
- [79:41]
Ross Douthit
The easy sandals you'll want to wear on repeat. DSW has you covered. Find a shoe for every you from the brands you love like Birkenstock, Nike, Adidas, New Balance and more. Head to your DSW store or visit dsw.com today.