Hi, beautiful. Let's watch Hailey Bieber's hair routine and see what she did totally wrong. And let's see what she can improve on. Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh. Oh, that was so good. Hailey Bieber? What is up, queen girl, sis? Foss, pussy. Oh my God. Okay, let's watch that. I'm going to be doing a cool hair tutorial for you guys. A lot of you have been asking to see how I do my own hair, when I do my own hair. This is seriously no shade at Hailey. Okay, maybe it's a little bit. I love what people say. Everybody's been asking me about my hair routine and I want to make a video. And it's like, you know, it's like two comments. Okay, in Hailey's case, it's probably more, but like, I love when I see that on TikTok and stuff. Like, everybody's been asking and they're like three followers and like, yes. Okay, so step one would be I spray a bit of volumizing spray into my wet hair before I blow dry it. Okay, that's a good idea. As long as she's using product, it's so important to use before doing any styling. Like, you're never going to get a great result if you do not use good products. I'm not kidding when I say hair depends on good products or else it's never going to be living its full potential. Little volume spray, love it. Probably has Panthenol in it. We're just going to swell the hair fiber and make everything appear thicker and fuller. So if you're finding a fragile hair, maybe think of using a volumizing spray. You can also prep with something like force field, my own product, which also has Panthenol in it. Next thing I'm going to do is blow drying your hair, which I already did. I love that she blow dried her hair very nicely. Like there is no frizz. With this look, you're going to want to use a flat brush to blow dry. That way you don't end up with bent ends. Like it's not going like inwards and outwards. And then when you use the flat iron and you put the waves on top of it, you're going to end up with ends that are like styled and like you don't want that. You want lived in texture. So usually the ends are more on the straight side or just very slightly wavy, but you don't want that really fresh blow out look on the ends of your hair. Avoid that to get a really cute lived in look.  Texturizing spray is great to start off with. It adds some hold in there. And a lot of the times it's very heat activated. So when you put that wave in there, you're going to see it's going to look nice and crisp. She's probably going to shake it out and get rid of that cast. It's going to leave. And it's going to give a really great texture overall. So I love that. I'm going to clip my hair up like this. She's sectioning. Yes. Go Hailey. This is just the least I could ask for is sectioning. People always just try to grab a piece without sectioning and it's just going to make your life so much harder and it's going to take way longer. I would have preferred her though to do a little bit of a different sectioning that I'm going to show you guys later. It's just easier and I feel like it just makes the process go by much quicker. I'm going to start by taking it piece by piece, section by section. I'm with the iron. I just do this. I don't know how to explain what this motion is. Kind of just a wave motion. The texture of my hair, especially when I'm like just showered and my hair is really, really clean is it's kind of like slick. I have to sometimes add a bit more of like a texture spray or a hair spray as I'm doing my hair so that it adds a little bit more of like a grip. For her, before she does each section, I would have totally recommended using a workable hair spray or just a very light hold hair spray. You really need something in there that's going to add a lot of grit to the hair. Please guys, don't be afraid of hair spray. I know so many girls are afraid of hair spray. Not saying that she is, but like I know one of you are afraid of it and you don't need to be. It's a great thing to use. It's not going to make your hair feel crunchy if you use the right one and it's just going to make your style last so much longer and look so much better. I also want to touch on her technique with the flat iron and a little bit but we'll save that for a couple more minutes. I'm going to take down one more section and this is how I usually do it too, right? Like I finished the whole head and then I look for different spots in my hair that I think I need to like fix or go over again. That's great, what the hell? Is she going to do anything wrong? Well, there's one thing I could already perfect on but one second.  So what the texturizing spray does is it gives a little bit of thickness and it mattifies the hair a little bit. I have really like sleek silky hair and when you're trying to do anything with an iron I feel like sometimes it kind of just like slides out. Ooh, it is coming together. And this is such a great thing to point out. She's directing the iron out and down at the beginning instead of inwards and out. That is going to give her nice volume around the face instead of it being like this. You know what I mean? So it's looking amazing. I do, however, see some crease marks from the flat iron. Listen, even I get creases sometimes but you can avoid them if you really move that iron quick, fast and keep it going at all times. It's when you do a little of this and then you stop and then you do this and you stop that's when you get those marks. So avoid stopping when you're doing the wave technique with the flat iron. Be careful about like not squeezing the iron too tight because even in that piece you could see that like it dented a little bit in my hair. My vibe right now, especially with my hairs I've been doing a lot of this like messy kind of like undone lived in. To me it's fine if it's not like these perfect like glossy wave. Now for the final layer. Something I'm noticing though is that she's not really doing anything besides that flat wave which is again, totally fine and totally up to her but I love to combine like different wave patterns in the head. That way it looks even more natural because this can look very faux wave. If it's all kind of done like this it's a very tell tale sign that like, you know obviously you flat ironed your hair and you made the waves but if you want to give yourself that natural looking but perfect wave with a flat iron you have to combine in some very light curls and some other waves that are going in different directions. I will go back over a couple pieces I've already done just to kind of like blend the top of my hair and blend the rest of it. Miss Haley Bieber, there's a lot of crimp on that hair that's looking like one of those 90s crimpers right there. Like they crimp shapes in your hair that's what that piece just looks like. For the top layer of my hair I don't start as high up with the iron because I know that it will cause it to dent. That's actually funny she says that cause I love to start up really high with the iron. It's more like I finished the whole look and then at the end I'll go up on a few pieces really high up and add just a little bit of bend at the root. It's just that extra cute finishing step that makes it all come together. It's all about the tiny details when it comes to doing flat iron waves. It looks crazy. With the front pieces she kind of did the same technique again. Literally I just need to repeat this that she doesn't have to do anything that I'm saying obviously. And she looks great, duh. I love to do just a very light curl in the front and like haul it out with your hands as much as possible so it gives you like a little wave but it's still opening your face up and giving you more cheekbone.  I add dry shampoo at the end because I hope that when I do my hair and then sleep on it it'll still be fresh enough to wear again the next day. So this is a very common thing that I do on people and so many clients do is use dry shampoo on their clean hair to prevent oils from coming up on your scalp. Totally a great idea. I just love a shiny wave. I know what the ideas look more lived in but like the glossy waves I just like when hair looks shiny is it just me? I don't wanna dull it out. Go in, especially at my roots with some dry shampoo looking clean and fresh but also textured and messy and a little bit gritty. I love that she's not afraid for it to look gritty and textured. I love that look too.  My last, last step is to take a really light hairspray that's not like a super hard hold hairspray. Spray lightly on both sides. That is it. Yes, we use a hairspray. The only thing she didn't use that I think Hailey would love is like a wax or a balm. I usually use my BDSM balm and that just adds like the perfect amount of texture but it's also hydrating for the ends at the same time.  It's just hot. Or she could also use a sea salt spray on top of that. That's also a great idea. Just right on the top again scrunch it in and that'll give you even more of that real lived in easygoing surfer girl vibe. But I'm actually gonna show you guys right now how you actually do all this and show you what I would have done differently on Miss Manny Quinn. Where are you Miss Manny Quinn? She's been in a good mood lately, I will say. And Hailey, I would give you a solid eight and a half out of 10 for that one. That was dope. That was really good. A lot of people cannot do that and you look fabulous. Oh, hi Miss Manny Quinn.  And yes, this is my brand new product and I'm obsessed with it. And then I put in some force field heat shield to protect her hair against heat damage. Very important. And now we are ready to do a little waving. Now I told you guys before that I like to section a little bit differently than Miss Hailey Biebs. And what we're gonna do is a little hello, hello. You know I love it. Just a circle in the middle of the hair. It doesn't need to be perfect except I wasn't trying to make it perfect. Clip the clip low because you don't want clip marks up here. All right, so that's a halo section. Boom, bang, boom. I just think it's easier like this. I don't know. Now let me show you how to do the wave maybe a little teensy bit better than Hailey. I'm gonna say it a little bit better. I'm gonna start all the way in the back because you wanna get that most annoying piece done first and that is always the very back piece that you can't see. Let's take the iron. We're gonna turn it down halfway first and then back up halfway. It's just this movement, just this rocking movement as you go. And we're not gonna let the iron sit in place at all. I'm not using the highest heats. That way the waves aren't too like crisp but also I almost forgot. Gonna put some hairspray in there. So just a very light bit of hairspray around everything and you're good to go. Honestly on camera it looks a lot more harsh than in real life. There actually isn't any creasing in the hair. You can see it's a wave. Maybe that's what happened to Hailey but there's no actual creases, folds in the hair. It's okay if you have these sort of bumps because that's what we're looking for. Now next to that wave I'm gonna do a curl because I don't want everything to be perfectly wave. So I'm gonna take the iron like this and turn halfway like that. So instead of doing a horizontal wave we're doing a vertical one. And now I'm gonna do the same technique but I'm gonna hold the iron more at a vertical rather than a horizontal. And that is what we get. A wave that doesn't completely match the one beside it because if you do match the one beside it everything's gonna kind of clump together and not look great. Beside that one I'm gonna do another horizontal one and we're gonna keep that iron moving. The faster you can go with this iron the better. Now on this side let's add a little curl, shall we? So I'm gonna turn the iron halfway and follow down the hair. And then after I'm gonna really pull on that hair and let that curl release. And now we have a curl in there. I know you're thinking like why would you do all that? But I swear it's gonna come together, okay? And I might take this piece and add a little bit of a crimp up here and let it down. All right, another horizontal wave. Another vertical. And we are on the front now. I'm gonna take this piece and do a slight curl. So I'm gonna start from here and drop it out at the ends. Okay, that's not as much as I wanted. So I'm gonna work on the front piece again. Okay, that's looking good. I like this bit right here but it's looking too curled in the bottom, did you think? Like it's a little too like done up. So I'm gonna turn the bottom in to make it not look so perfect. Okay, gorgeous. Honestly, at the end, we'll break this up a bit so it doesn't look so curled. But so far, this is the effect we are getting. Something really lived in and gorgeous. And it's gonna come together even more when we let down that top layer. So let me do the other side. We are done with the perimeter. Let's let down the rest of the hair. And I'm just gonna work through this hair just like this and get some waves in there. We're gonna do the same technique over and over again. And I also wanna show you one other trick I like to use. I basically do a curl and then I reverse the curl on the ends. And it gives you a curl that's kind of like confused. It's like going one way and then it's going the other way. So it just gives you a beautiful wavy effect and you can even iron the bottom a little bit and it's giving you more of like an S wave rather than a wave that goes horizontally. Okay, now that we are done for the most part on the waves, we're gonna add just a few finishing touches. And this is what I was saying before. I love just putting a little bit more in there right at the top. I just grab really small pieces like this and just add a bend and let it down. It's so subtle, but it's really gonna give that final result just that extra, because that is what it's all about. See that like, ooh, it's all about those really small pieces that make it look like it's actually your real hair that is perfectly wavy. To me, that looks gorgeous and perfect. To you, I don't know. Let's do the other side now. All right, time for the finishing touches. Let's add some BDSM, slick and defined bomb. Obviously, it's like literally can't live without it. I'll put it on my hands like this and do a little scrunch of poo at the bottom. Oh, see how that just makes the waves come alive? Wow, hot. And a little bit of sea salt spray. I like to just hold the hair up and spray it on there. And I always do this sort of like tangling motion. And everybody's always like, what are you doing? And I'm like, I am just trying to knot up the hair so it doesn't look so perfect. Let's top it off with some hair spray. Gorgeous. And here we are. This is the finished look, super lived in, so pretty. She looks gorgeous. We look like we could be best friends because you have great hair. We are best friends, I mean, right? I slay your hair all the time so we better be best friends at this point.  My name is Courtney. So freaking cute. And the more she messes it up, the better it looks. Sexy summer hair or Hailey Bieber hair. That is how you get that five minute, beautiful lived in wave brought to us by Hailey Bieber. It really is so easy to do if you have the right technique. If you guys wanna check out my haircare, my hair color line, you can do so with the link right down below or go to xmodohair.com. That's all for today. Thank you for watching. Don't forget to live your extra lives and I'll see you next time. Bye.


Our next caller is Amanda from Washington. Hi Amanda, how can we help you? Hi guys. I have kind of an interesting story I feel like. About six weeks ago, I came back from a six-week-long training with the Army and I lost a good amount of weight with that. Probably 10 pounds and I started out at 134, so 10 pounds less than that. And I didn't actually get to finish the training, so I want to go back. I have unfinished business, but because of that weight loss, when I try again, I want to have a lot more weight, mostly muscle and I don't care if some of it's fat too. I just need to make sure I can still keep my run time up for this training and then just maybe gain some more stability and durability because another thing I noticed with this training was my knees got quite inflamed. We did a lot of kneeling with our rex sax on and I've been doing maps performance and I've been back for six weeks and I could just now do walking lunges again to touch my knee to the floor. So it's been a long road of trying to heal up, but like I said, I want to try again. I'm pretty committed to it, but I want to see what you guys have to say for making it a little safer. Okay, so you want to get a good run time and you want to continue to build muscle. What's the run time specifically? What are you looking to maintain? Right now, my run isn't a problem. I need to do a 40-minute five-miler, so it's just eight minutes a mile and that's fairly easy for me right now. I could do a 37-minute just even if I was sick. So just set up. Okay, so you want to be able to maintain under 40-minute five-mile run, but you also want to build muscle and strength. Yeah. Okay, you could probably maintain that by doing that particular run twice a week. Yeah, once or twice. You know, twice a week I would do the five-mile run and then twice a week I would do or maybe three days, but probably twice I would do heavy lifting and I would increase calories, make sure your protein intake is really high and that should be the right recipe. I don't think you're going to lose your run time if you maintain those two days a week and that leaves enough room for you to do a resistance training program that'll help you build muscle. I think performance is perfect. You mentioned knee inflammation. You got to maintain some of that agility and that mobility. You will build muscle on mass performance. It is definitely a muscle building program. It's just muscle building in a functional way and I think that's what you need. So I'd stay on mass performance and then try what I said. I think you could even do, if I were to do the running, I would go three days a week, but it would look like this. One mile on one day, that's it. So just one mile fast, which is take you seven minutes to eight minutes. Another day in there, it would be half the total mileage and then only one day a week would it be full. So you're not running that much. And then what Sal said with mass performance in conjunction with those, you should be able to keep your time solid on that. And then most of the programming is focused around building muscle and it would, I would toggle you back and forth between two days a week and three days a week, completely based off of how you're feeling. So if you're feeling great and bodies are spawning and we don't have any sort of achiness, I'd let you train three days a week. If a week came through and you're like, Oh, I'm really tight. I'm stiff. I'd scale you back to two, but then I would put emphasis on the mobility sessions on those days. And that's where we'd spend more of our time. Okay. With the knee inflammation, would you guys recommend trying like stepping back, doing some more like weighted lunges and trying to like increase the strength in my knees or with that? What do you think is aggravating right now? I think like assessing that would help a lot. Like, you know, with our prime program, I know we have a couple of different tests that kind of work your way through that, whether it's, you know, a tracking issue, whether it's an ankle or a hip, you know, derived issue. It sounds like it might be from you getting on your knees. Is it the kneeling, the running or the exercise? The knee over the toe kind of? Yeah, it was kneeling with a 70 pound rucksack.  Yeah, there's nothing, I mean, there's not much you can do to prevent that aside from working on strength and mobility and your ankles and hips that might help with how you kneel. But it sounds like the inflammation is from the actual pressure of the floor. Yeah, I believe so. Yeah, so that's a little different, right? That's going to be, that means, you know, stop doing that, I guess, to help with the inflammation. But if that's what you're required to do, then I would still work on mobility because the less tightness you have overall, probably the less painful it'll be to kneel down. And no, there's some good points to that, right? I mean, the more mobile you're going to be in your hips and ankles, the more you can rely on actually the muscles supporting and so you're not actually just letting the resting all your weight on the joint. So maybe what happens right now, when you get down on the knee, you like completely are at rest and you let all your weight go straight to the patella where maybe if you have good ankle mobility, good hip mobility, and good strength in your lower body, you keep your muscles tense in that position so they alleviate a little bit of pressure. Right. Incorporate something like a Turkish get up as well so you can kind of get up and down off your knee from the floor weighted. So really try to like work on the skill of that and be able to activate your muscles properly to help support your joints in that position. Oh, that's great. Awesome. Am I reading this correctly? Are you are you trying to become an army ranger? Is that correct? Yeah. Well, it's a little different going to the ranger leadership course versus going through assessment and selection. So this is anything for the army's premier leadership course. You get a tab. So I would have something on my uniform, but I wouldn't be a forward operator shooting bad guys. Still, still, still awesome. Yeah, this is like, I think there's a theme to today, right?  Yeah, quite a few of you guys. So you said you have mass performance. Justin brought up maps prime. Do you have maps prime? Because if not, we'll send it over to you. I have performance in prime. You're set then. Smart, smart. You're set then, Amanda. Just do those things. I think you'll be okay. Good. And I want to thank Adam to his pushup video on YouTube. I started out doing my perfect pushups and only being able to do three. And by the time a year later, um, after working on the, uh, suggestions that he made, I got 52 perfect pushups. That's 50 more pushups than Adam could do. Mark that up there. Adam 17 sal four. So we're doing good here. Awesome. He's made that up. Thanks for calling. Thank you, Amanda. Yeah. Thank you guys so much. Thanks. You know, uh, note here when you're, what it takes to maintain a certain level of performance is a lot less than what it takes to get. Right. So if you're already, uh, like in this example, when we were talking to Amanda, she can already run a sub 40 minute five miles, right? She said 37 minutes easy when she's sick. You don't need a lot to maintain that, right? That's why I think that's why I thought only even one day of doing the full run and then half of the run on another day and then only a one mile the other day. So you talk about seven minutes on one day. She actually sprints, uh, what, another 14 to 20 something minutes on another day. And then only one day as she hit in that 35, 40 minute and she'll actually probably see, she might improve, improve a little bit from that. So easily maintain that. And then with two or three days of strength training, she should be able to put on some good muscle. Hey, if you enjoyed that clip, you can find the full episode here or you can find other clips over here and be sure to subscribe.


in the United States, where, as you probably know, American universities are the specialists in hypersensitivity to offense. And so punching down is wrong means someone of higher status should not be criticizing or attacking someone of lower status. And that's wrong, okay? So that's the second value judgment I wanna work with. Punching down is wrong. And then the third is fairly straightforward, homosexuality is wrong. Let me just put a little context into this.  And that will be important for purposes of Freud's example.  Well, let me just start with a kind of crude initial gloss on the way in which Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, what they might say about each of these. So why do people in the United States, many people, believe the death tax is wrong? The Marxian answer, and this is B1 on your handout, the ruling class made you believe it. It was a kind of ideological indoctrination. It was in the interest of extremely wealthy people that you be persuaded that taxing the estates of people upon death is wrongful. And let me just add a factual detail here that's important, which is that there are no taxes on your wealth at death, unless it's more than a million dollars now. It may even be higher than that. And even then, you really have to have more than $10 million to even perhaps run into some real trouble, as there are ways to avoid it before then. And Marx's thought is, if you, as a citizen worth $500,000 or an ordinary amount of money, not a super rich person, if you realize that the reason you had come to believe that this was a death tax and that it was wrongful was because it was in the interest of extremely wealthy people that you believe it, you'd have a lot of trouble believing it any further. And we'll come back to that. All right, how about the second one? You think that, and now this is in the spirit of Nietzsche, punching down is wrong. Well, the real reason you believe that is because you're envious to start with of those who are in a position to punch down. And at the same time, you're afraid, right? It's harmful, it's upsetting, it's disturbing that they can do this to you. But you can't do anything about it. I mean, you can't really do anything about it. You can't, by hypothesis here, punch back in any meaningful way. So you're left with this combination of fear and envy. And all you can do is declare, well, it's wrongful behavior. And of course, it's ironic because if you envy it, you'd actually like to do it too, but you can't. And so perhaps you're motivated by that emotion that Nietzsche called raison-t-amant, which is a kind of combination of both envy and sort of festering hatred, frustration. When something is harmful to you, you can't do anything about it, you wish you could do it too, but you can't. And this gives rise to a different value judgment. Oh, actually punching down is just wrong. Nobody ought to do that. Nobody ought to do that. And then our third, and this is Freud's hypothesis. And this is not Freud's hypothesis, just to be clear about anyone's judgment that homosexuality is wrong. But it often turns out to be a diagnosis that's apt for those who are most obsessed with the wrongness of homosexuality, namely that it's your fear of your own desire for gay sex that made you believe it. In other words, in Freudian terminology, hostility towards homosexuality is a reaction formation. That is, it's a kind of defense mechanism that the psyche puts up when it is aware at an unconscious level of a strong desire for homosexual sex, one that the subject experiences is very frightening, socially unacceptable, whatever the explanation is, they can't bear the thought. And so to protect themselves from their own actual desire, they adopt as their conscious posture the view that homosexuality is morally abhorrent.  This is the time and this is the place for you to share about that. So we're talking here about the homeunitics of suspicion and the professor there was drawing on the works of Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud. Now, there's someone, a leftist who has developed this in a much deeper way that just kind of blew my mind. It's a philosopher, Ronny Gordman and he's got this work in progress called conservative claims of cultural oppression, the nature and origins of conservophobia. So he takes left-wing critiques and applies them to the left, right? So the left bills itself, let's just take the New York Times as an example of the left as objective, diverse, inclusive, thoughtful, reality-based, benevolent, well, perhaps not. So people on the left tend to be the worst offenders of their own axioms when they talk about the evils of those who dispute their liberal versions of reality, their liberal versions of facts and policy and morality. So the bigotry that people on the left direct was those with whom they merely disagree is staggering, right? So the New York Times, the mainstream journalists and academics and big shots in academia and bureaucracy they imagine themselves as uniquely objective and inclusive and thoughtful. And they've cultivated this automatic social reflex that dismisses conservative opinions as mental or emotional immaturity, some mindless reptilian instincts, some unthinking fear and hatred, right? That easily recognized as such by these sophisticated souls. So there's this social reflex that's become integral to liberal identity, it's become woven into the social fabric. So people on the right find themselves suffocated by an insidious and pervasive conservophobia, right?  Why is it socially acceptable? Because people on the left occupy the high grounds of American culture. They dominate almost all our institutions, right? So the left's aborted ideals of tolerance, diversity, understanding, they are not extended to people on the right, right? So if you expose the moral and intellectual failings that liberals associate with conservatives, you'll see this subtly mirrored in liberals own treatment of people on the right, right? So it's time to make people on the left answerable to their own professed ideals. And it's now fallen upon conservatives or people on the right to essentially uphold the left's professed ideals and hold them accountable, right? So this conservative claim of cultural oppression is not about defending some traditional order of things before which all upstanding God-fearing citizens must submit, rather it is a way of unearthing the deeper structures of liberal left discourse to expose how that way of talking and thinking and speaking about reality makes natural the unearned privileges of people on the left and passing it off as some sort of timeless order of things when really it is a contingent status hierarchy. So when conservatives claim cultural oppression they essentially hold themselves out as the counterculture to the dominant liberal culture. They are the last holdouts of resistance against the false consciousness of the liberal left hegemony. So the conventional wisdom of people like the New York Times is that conservatism thrives on vague cultural resentments that channel what are essentially economic grievances into symbolic obsessions with the depredations of an imaginary liberal elite whose haughty pretentiousness is spaciously contrasted with the basic goodness and authenticity of the conservative ordinary American, the sort of the earth. And so from the New York Times perspective this is how conservative propagandists like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity divert the attention of ordinary Americans away from the transgressions of the real ruling class the business elite who know how to harness social conservatism toward their own advantage. And so from a left wing perspective this diagnosis is supported by the historical record is the story of the modern conservative movement and it's just basic common sense about the average Americans real interests. Now, if liberals cannot be brought to acknowledge genuine conservative grievances that's because they're very identities as liberals ineurism to that to which the grievances react. It's a perennial theme of the left that oppressed groups can perceive iniquities that dominant groups are disposed to overlook.  It's your privilege, bro, that is blinding you. Now, if the person on the left wants to be intellectually consistent they must ask whether the relationship between liberals and conservatives in America could be yet another instance of this phenomenon. Have liberals transgressed against conservatives in ways that their very liberalism does not allow them to recognize, right? So liberals are gonna claim that conservative claims of cultural oppression are just empty posturing but is that not to be expected that a ruling class will thus dismiss the outcries of the oppressed group, right? Liberals have this bemused incredulity toward conservative grievances but maybe that's just a natural byproduct of the very oppression being alleged. Maybe the dominant cultures, language and concepts will always privilege the perspective of its ruling elites who shape the common sense to which oppressed groups are made to answer. So maybe the critical theorists of the left have long made these arguments on behalf of racial minorities, women and gays. Well, what happens when you extend these arguments? The hermeneutics of suspicion on behalf of people on the right, right? So liberal elites believe that they stand above retrograde conservatism which they think they're enlightenment ideals, right? That everyone's born naturally good and a society that's corrupted people but through the pursuit of reason we can liberate people on the right from their various hero systems to which people on the right remain beholden. So hero systems are ways of thinking about ultimate reality. They are systems of collective production of meaning. And so liberals see conservatism as a stain by this primitive attraction to these relics of pre-modernity. But the conservative suspicion is that liberalism is itself a hero system in disguise. It's a hero system that stays concealed behind a secular facade of enlightenment, pragmatism and utilitarianism. So liberals wish to see themselves as committed solely to ordinary human fulfillment short of any higher metaphysical aspirations. But people on the right see that leftism, liberalism is unbeknownst to itself driven by a secularized religious impulse and a secularized spiritual ideal that plays themselves out through the medium of ostensibly secular goals. So liberalism is a hero system that disguises itself as the transcendence of all hero systems. So this aspiration to rise above the merely human was once conceived in expressly religious terms as fealty to the city of God over the city of man. But today this aspiration has become secularized and it transpires politically and culturally as the imperative to rise above conservatism toward liberalism and leftism. And it gives its adherents a special feeling of spiritual purity that stands exalted above the fallen realm of conservatism. So from a liberal left perspective, conservatism is not a competing philosophy to be reputed. It is essentially an ingrained sinfulness to be exposed and to be disciplined away. So the hero systems of the right valorize concepts like God, country and family. And they must operate in full public view. But the hero systems of the left operate secretly within insulated institutional enclaves whose specialized discourse provides them with a pragmatic veneer. So this is what distinguishes the power of the left from that of its rival power brokers on the right who do not enjoy the benefit of this plausible deniability. People on the left think they are objective. People on the right know that they hold a particular worldview. So this is why you have a proliferation of conservative laments about the cultural decadence of various liberal elite enclaves like academia, the media and the Hollywood, which are understood to perpetuate this essential inequality and deception and oppression of the right. So it is in these enclaves that the left rules that allows liberals to imagine they have transcended the primitive and unconscious identity affirmation needs of conservatives in favor of this new rational autonomy, this enlightenment that can dispense with the hero systems of the right. So today's culture wars are a contemporary recapitulation of the struggles by which modernity first emerged out of the pre-modern. It's a clash between elites trying to inculcate the disciplines and repressions of the modern identity and the unwashed masses trying to resist this extirpation of their traditional often disordered folk ways, a role now filled by traditional American values.  So conservatives are more visibly attuned to its cultural contingency of liberalism. They're more averse to particular forms of disciplined disengaged agency into which liberals have been more successfully socialized. So contemporary liberalism represents the apex of the disciplinary impulses that created modernity and the most extreme outgrowth of the secularization of this religious impulse and the democratization of this sensibility, the now forgotten pre-enlightenment roots of progressive sensibilities. So liberals celebrate their superior civility. This is a modern and secularized variant of them supposedly superseding their base natural impulses and it is these impulses that fuel liberals reflexive aversion to traditionalism and conservatism, right? That right-wing ways of viewing life are just basically crude animal instincts, right?  So politically incorrect gut enthusiasts tend to be the most intensely detested of liberalism's many enemies because they refuse this training. So they serve liberals as premier social symbols for the unhinged impulsivity and the potential violence of the undisciplined pre-modern self lacking the disengaged self-control and self-possession of the modern liberal New York times identity, right? So liberals define themselves in opposition to this barbaric past. So they must shame and stigmatize all who remind them of it and conservatives are replete with such reminders. Therefore, they must be extirpated. So liberals see themselves as at the vanguard of the modern West civilizing process. So this has thrust them into the role of disciplinarians. And in reaction to that, people on the right have cultivated their own special kind of emancipationist ethos. So conservatives may well have absorbed the moral and intellectual reflexes of the left and developed a postmodernism and multiculturalism of the right because they are targets of the same civilizing norms that the left used to protest had been imperiously foist upon non-white, non-Western peoples by a condescending European colonialism. So liberalism is secretly illiberal because it can flourish only in as much as it is prepared to coerce this particular brand of self-discipline and self-control upon the unwilling who's suffering an alienation in the face of this undeclared agenda never enters liberalism's moral calculus. So liberals cannot see the broader context of their idealism because their antiquated alignment of view of reason as predominantly conscious and disembodied leads them insensible to this embodied layer of human experience. And so overconfident of their ability to recognize oppression and inequality. So it's like the difference between going to yoga and taking Alexander Technique classes, right?  And you wanna have a healthier way of living. But when you do yoga, you will only ingrain the habits you already have, your self-destructive habits of unnecessary tension and compression.  Now, when you take an Alexander Technique lesson, you are learning to recognize your habits of compression and oppression and pulling down.  So just before the 2008 election on MSNBC's Morning Joe program and the discussion was the increasingly unhinged racism and xenophobia seemed to be gripping crowds at McCain-Palant rallies where some attendees apparently driven batty by the prospect of an African-American president reacting with shouts of terrorists and kill him that the mayor mentions a Barack Obama's name. So the show's mild-minded conservative host former GOP Congressman Joe Scarborough responded that these outbursts were surely beyond the pale but he then seized upon these reports as an occasion to remind liberals that they should also pay attention to their own incivility problems to stop judging conservatives by a double standard as though they were the only ones capable of lapsing into incivility. When a few misfits behave outrageously at Republican campaign events, this is taken by liberals as evidence for the latent racism and general depravity of conservatives, but no objections are raised when a well-respected liberal commentator like Thomas Frank writes a book such as What's the Matter with Kansas, a book that takes aim not at one man but an entire state and dismisses its conservative voting citizens as idiots. Right? So Joe Scarborough is quite willing to turn around and criticize his own when they cross the line, yet liberals seem unwilling to engage in similar self-policing and willing to acknowledge let alone denounce the hatred and bigotry that grows in their own ranks. So conservatives routinely held accountable for the slightest modicum of real or perceived bigotry while liberals can casually indulge their own bigotry against conservatives in plain view without any fear of reproach. So liberals routinely excoriate as beyond the pale any and all speculation into the genetic basis and heritability of intelligence, right? You can't look into the genetic basis and heritability of group differences or gender differences, right? But liberals are astonishingly hypocritical in their own giddiness to entertain the notion that conservatives have broken brains based solely on the fact that they are conservatives. So Jenner Goldberg makes this point in his book, Liberal Fascism. And so Satoshi Kanazawa, a psychologist argues in psychology today that liberalism represents a genetically novel dispensation. So we have an evolutionary history in close knit tribal societies. Who's your mob? Who your mob, right? Right? We grew up in ancient times in close knit tribal societies and this naturally disposes us to restrict our altruism to our kin. But liberalism has a willingness to devote large proportions of private resources for the benefit of those who are not genetically related to us. So liberalism perhaps represents the transcendence of our merely natural state. It's a freedom from the rigorous genetic logic that binds other animals. So perhaps this is why liberals are smarter than conservatives. Apart from a few areas in life, such as some areas of business, liberals control all our institutions because they are just so smart. But the Achilles' heel of this argument, you taught Jenner Goldberg, resides in the exceptions it concedes. So conservatives are frequently successful in business. Reason is that business, just like the military law enforcement engineering and the hard sciences, does not create institutional ideological filters to screen out conservatives. The bottom line in business is the bottom line profit rather than affinity for social engineering, liberal groupthink, or progressive do-goodery. So this is why conservatives can thrive in these fields as they cannot in liberal-dominated milieu. So the genetic argument is only plausible if we first discount the obvious cultural, historical, and social explanations for discrepancies in liberal and conservative performance in fields like academia, entertainment, and publishing.  They're keeping conservatives out, period. And this kind of mirrors the historical dispute between white supremacists and their egalitarian adversaries. So the liberal here is attempting to defend an unequal status quo. Oh, so you think that some groups are smarter than others. You think that some groups commit more crimes than others. You think some groups have more stable families than others. You think that there are all these predictable life history patterns that can be basically broken down by racial groups. You're saying essentially that nature has color-coded people for our benefit, right? So the conservative decries this explanation of the liberal that unequal group outcomes are the result of culture. And the liberal says, oh, this explanation is self-serving, right? You're making all these claims of pervasive prejudice and discrimination, right? You're highlighting the need for egalitarian change. But many on the left regard themselves liberals as a master race, right? And people on the right could argue this is a social illusion generated by unequal power relations. The liberals dominate most parts of our society. They dominate almost all our institutions. So I'm sure you've all been enjoying these very tasty excerpts that I've shared with you from Decoding the Guru's latest episode on Lex Friedman and Jonathan Haidt. I guess Lex takes things seriously and tries extremely hard at everything. So I'm not sure it is performative. I think he might just be telling us what he's focused on at the moment. So would you say like, for example, base? Sometimes I stand, not wearing a suit. I sometimes wear a suit, especially I'm going to film. I wear a suit when I go outside. I just enjoy the way I feel when I wear a suit. But at home, I'm wearing a T-shirt and jeans. Right now, I'm not wearing any pants. Just kidding. I'm wearing jeans. But you wouldn't know it if I didn't, which is the magic of the internet. So I like that joke. He did have these quips that we delivered to that panel and he does it a couple of times. Sometimes they're not good, but when they're good, they're nice little sites. I feel like I get some insight into Lex's personality. And most of this is about his personality rather than about whatever he's arguing for or his takes on things, which we're going to get to.  Yes, the jokes aren't super funny. But I think they indicate something nice. There's a poking fun. Yeah, I get a good vibe from Lex. The pole-facedness I think could do better with being a bit more punctured. And he does do that. He does. Sometimes I kind of poke fun at himself. That's nice to see. But like there, he described wearing a suit at all times when he's outside because he likes the way it makes him feel. And now, if you've seen Lex, he's always dressed in this kind of same suit, like a black, silver-black, then black tie. Yeah, like Superman. Yeah, or like man-black, right? That kind of look, if you imagine it. And so for you, and maybe for me as well, I'm just thinking this through, is you think that Lex is just kind of like it is. He likes the feeling of a suit, so he just wears a suit at all times outside in the summer. Yeah, my son, who's 12, went for many years when he was younger, just wanted to wear the same color shirt, the same color pair of pants and identical copies of those. And I think there's a certain kind of male instinct which is comfortable with having like a uniform. I mentioned Superman because I'm imagining like 10 Superman outfits racked up next to each other. I can see a certain kind of satisfaction and comfort in that for a certain kind of person. Yeah, yeah. I guess if you put it like that, like viewing it as a kind of a costume or a uniform that you wear, it doesn't make sense. Okay, and the chat asked, my circumcision did it hurt when I circumcised as an infant. And so I had two ritual circumcisions where they use that device where you prick the skin to draw a little bit of blood, right? So it's called a hata-fata arm. It's a ritual circumcision. So I had that done twice. My initial conversion was in 1992, 93 and then had it again in 2009. So yeah, you never really forget when someone pricks your prick to get a little bit of blood. But hey, it was all worth it. So I love this work in progress on conservative claims of cultural oppression, the nature and origins of conservophobia because this book is written by a leftist but he takes left-wing critiques and applies them to the left, right? And he displays empathy for people on the right, right? So you've got the gatekeepers of academia publishing Hollywood or these bastions of liberalism and they believe that they are judging merit and it's just purely on the basis of merit that liberals are succeeding in these institutions and conservatives are not. Just like when it comes to different outcomes for racists, conservatives say, well, this is merit, right? Different groups have different gifts. So some people are better suited to running fast. Other people are better at rapping. Other people are better at playing basketball. Other people are better at business that some groups are more intelligent than other groups. Some groups commit high rates of crime than other groups. Some groups have more solid family lives and the left-wing critique of that is, oh, that's just because society has been set up a certain way just because institutions have been set up a certain way. Well, why can't you apply that left-wing critique to left-wing institutions? Maybe it's not the left succeeding purely on the basis of merit. Maybe the institutions have been set up in a way that rewards people on the left and punishes people on the right, right? So people on the left complain that white people are constantly unconsciously discriminating against blacks, right? So the left-wing critique is that our prevailing measures of supposedly objective merit that these are just reflections of white supremacy, right? Maybe the whole idea of merit just serves white people's need to believe that their social positions and life outcomes the result of something more than the brute fact of social power and racial domination. But maybe liberal merit, maybe that's just merely an instrument of liberal domination, right? Maybe liberal institutions have been fine-tuned to exclude conservatives and to suppress conservative achievement, right?  Well, is it not also possible that liberals have not been trained to recognize conservative intelligence or have been trained to not recognize it? All right, when you look at things like black nationalism, right, you've got critical race theorists who argue that liberal integrationism is premised on the mistaking assumption that the category of merit itself is neutral and personal and that it somehow developed outside the economy of social power with a significant currency of race, class, and gender that marks American social life. But maybe liberalism has its own economy of social power. Maybe only by ignoring this background can liberals bask in their imagined intellectual superiority. So liberals argue that conservatives are underrepresented in academia because they are temperamentally drawn to other professions. But maybe this is because conservatives, like black students lack proper role models. Maybe like blacks and other oppressed minorities, maybe from the beginning, they were dismissed by their liberal professors as hopeless cretins. Maybe they were never placed in a position to develop the talents that would allow them to succeed. Maybe they've been deprived of opportunity because of the domination of the liberal master race. So people on the left say, racists generate their own social truth by creating conditions under which oppressed races are forced to conform to racial prejudices. Or maybe liberalism produces its own self-fulfilling prophecies, creating what it then casts as the natural inequality of liberals and conservatives. Right, liberals may not see their intellectual and moral and social standards as politically motivated, just as whites do not conceive of themselves as a distinctive racial group. Maybe for white people, according to critical theorists on the left, their consciousness of whiteness is predominantly an unconsciousness of whiteness. Well, perhaps liberals suffer from an analogous blindness. Maybe they fail to recognize themselves as a distinct class with distinct values, distinct tastes, distinct interests. Maybe this is the silent background of their anti-conservative biases. All right, maybe conservatives should be understood on their own terms rather than assimilated to the values, the interests and the prejudices of the dominant liberal culture, right?  Well, maybe it's time to turn those critiques against the left, right? Maybe conservatives should be issuing a parallel set of claims, which liberalism's own first principles require them to acknowledge, right? Maybe it's time. Right, you've heard the term people of faith, so that originally is kind of a new agey aversion to organized religion, but it's caught on among conservative Christians. They see the advantages of comparing themselves with other oppressed groups. So you have an anti-abortion activist like Lila Rose, who taught her supporters, who says we can't have an America completely free with the complete end of abortion. We can have that America. We overcame many things in our history. We've overcome many things from slavery to civil rights abuses in the 20th century to child labor. We've overcome many things, even the Revolutionary War to have our independence won. We've overcome many things in this country, the women's rights movement for suffrage, and we can overcome. We can defeat the hopelessness and the lies and the despair that says that we need abortion and we can overcome it and it's happening. So William F. Buckley defined a conservative as a fellow who is standing a thought history yelling stop, but conservative positions are perhaps better understood as onward. Maybe they are a core to forward-looking progress. Maybe they are the next courageous step in an ongoing struggle for the freedom and dignity of an ever-expanding circle of moral concern. That is the liberals of the civil rights era first chanted, we shall overcome, but it is now conservatives who ask us to overcome liberalism itself in the name of its own first principles. So Phyllis Schlafly, for example, railed against the meaninglessness lack of fulfillment among American women in the spirit of Betty Friedan and blamed those ills of American women on feminism rather than sexism. So the ERA, as opposed by Phyllis Schlafly, is a threat to women's most fundamental rights, such as the right to be supported by a husband and to keep one's baby. So the American Center for Law and Justice, the ACLJ, is the ACLU of the right, if you use itself as defending the religious freedom of Christians against secular oppression. So maybe the meaning of liberal ideals is essentially indeterminate and can simply be constantly reinterpreted in accordance with conservative priorities. So the initial prerogatives that the left threatened were things like landed titles, corporate monopolies, union busting, any kind of white male or heterosexual privilege. But now the left is going after the mere social dignity of simply not being a leftist. Right, liberal tolerance has not been extended to people on the right.  The forgotten minority that got overlooked amidst all the liberal celebrations of tolerance, sensitivity and diversity is the conservative, right? So conservative college students tend to be buried under an avalanche of scorn, both from their professors and peers. They are treated as if they are crow magnets with bones in their noses. Then one or two rounds in the barrel, conservative thinking students learn the local custom.  Now, for growing numbers of organizations of conservative women, they are developing conservative safe space stickers. So they're appropriating a concept that used to be used to highlight gays' special vulnerability to harassment and abuse, right? But gays are no longer the group shunned or berated on modern college campuses. Campus intolerance is now turned on conservatives and it is the conservative students and faculties who most need a safe space. So liberalism has erected a vast regime of sensitivity training to uproot every last trace of real or imagined homophobia, but they will not take the slightest steps to remedy another equally pressing problem and that is their own conservatophobia. So Ann Coulter notices that liberals, when featured on the covers of Time and Newsweek or The New York Times, always bathe in a beatific light while conservatives are photographed in lighting that casts a menacing glow and always seem to show five o'clock shadows. So TV and Hollywood tends to treat lawyers, teachers, social workers and others who work in liberal professions to mostly sunny portrayals while disproportionately casting businessmen in villainous roles. So if the entertainment industry formally relegated blacks to the roles of pimps, criminals, vagrants and other undesirables, so now it is conservatives who must play social prize and have been doing so in the entertainment industry for more than 50 years.  So just as blacks in the Jim Crow South face the constant risk of harassment from racist whites for whom simply being black was provocation enough. So Ben Shapiro argues that today's young conservatives have to face liberal bullying on a daily basis from the elementary school level through grad school and onto their careers, particularly in law education and Hollywood. Conservative commentator Laura Ingram was bullied at her first media job at CBS. She was prohibited from entering the makeup room until liberal Paula Zahn had exited. Conservative book buyers are bullied by the unionized employees of Barnes and Noble. David Horowitz alleges these liberal bullies go out of their way to make conservative book purchases in their regard as barely literate Philistines feel unwelcome. There's a book by Jebediah Biller Outnumber, the Chronicles of a Manhattan Conservative, and it recounts the author's life in New York City during the heady days of the 2008 elections.  So the author was flabbergasted when an acquaintance acknowledged, I just know that I was brought up to believe that conservatives aren't good people and people I've met, conservative people, always rub me the wrong way. So what Jews were a century ago, conservatives are today. They are the recipients of unthinking, inherited prejudice, and this bigotry is given a free pass in the mecca of enlightened progressivism. So liberals deny their conservative phobia. They chalk it up to the intensity of their anger toward conservatives to conservatives own beliefs and conduct, but don't opponents of homosexuality justify their homophobia in the same way. It's principled moral opposition to a socially deleterious practice like orgies at a bathhouse while doing a lot of math. So liberals claim that moral opposition to homosexuality simply reveals more about the moral opponent than it does about homosexuality than homosexuals. Well, if you then apply that argument on liberals, conservatives believe that liberals phobia about conservatives reveals the liberals unacknowledged internal conflicts. So people on the left are consumed with a primal but irrational desire to inflict their emotions on you so that you might share their misery and feel their pain. So conservatives are the new socially sanctioned scapegoats. They are foils on which liberals project every social ill on which liberals externalize their every psychic conflict on which liberals rationalize their projections with this aura of moral high-mindedness that disguises their real motivations. So if liberals insist on diversity, tolerance and equal respect, then conservatives should insist that they be afforded the genuine article rather than Orwellian inversions that liberalism in fact offers. That's because that's a serious attire when he's in the world living up to his principles as a man. Well, I think I'll be like that myself in terms of wearing the suits, in terms of wearing like the same thing each day. Like I just buy like 10 t-shirts from the same brand. I vary the color. They're not all black. I was waxing the color by the Unicode and it's the same night. The rebel summer wear is fantastic. So I do get that. And I guess if I wanted to steal money, it's a bit like in the pandemic when everybody was working from home, that putting on a suit or whatever you were at your office could put you in a different mindset, right? And that seems to be what Lex is angling for here. Yeah, like I was trying to say with the references to the Nazis and stuff like that.  Most people are kind of more cynical and sophisticated than that. And actually that might speak to his appeal and why he is such a popular YouTuber slash podcaster while he does get such a wide variety of high profile guests. At some level, people, Americans particularly probably respond to that kind of innocence. So the last thing then, the end of his day, let's see what he does before he heads off the bed he buys. Actually, after the hour of literature reading, I always take a pause and do the part of the mantra that I do in the morning, that's gratitude. Again, it's being thankful that I'm alive, that I survived another day looking forward to the next day and just be grateful for all of the moments that are full of joy in the day.  I mean, just the entirety of the technology, everything is magical, everything is magical. Everything's magical, that's freedom. All right, so conservatism, this is from Ronnie Goodman's Work in Progress on Conservophobia. Conservatism has always prescribed cultural nationalism on the premise that uprooted moral universalism cannot provide the social cohesion that is brought about by narrower circles of identification such as nationalism, cultural nationalism, in which true ethical feeling must always be rooted. So I understand people, not primarily as individuals, but members of a family, a group, a nation, a mob. So the little platoon we belong to is the first group that we should love. It's the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love towards our country and then to mankind. So conservatism is now a form of cultural nationalism for the little platoon is now defined by conservatism itself. So conservatism, conservatives understand themselves as a despised, stigmatized group, right? They are punished for rejecting liberalism. They've been unofficially banished from full and equal participation in public life. So by claiming cultural oppression, they celebrate a new quasi-ethnic identity and story.            So liberals see stupidity, but conservative claimers of cultural oppression see the silent heroism of a beleaguered and colonized people who resist the encroachments of a coterie of cloistered elites, uprooted rationalists and cosmopolitan, but nothing but contempt for the native culture of the less eloquent but more wholesome ordinary American who is now seen to exist on a lower moral intellectual and spiritual plane. They live in a world where liberalism prescribes not only the terms of the debate, but also the rhetorical atmosphere in which any debate must take place. So liberalism in the public square has become taken for granted common sense. Conservative initiatives must be advanced in a context saturated by liberal assumptions. So we're all liberals now by dint of contagion, if not conviction. So given liberalism's present rhetorical supremacy, it is natural that conservatives would prefer to reinterpret liberal ideals in their own favor, rather than categorically reject them. And this is what conservatives are doing by arguing that the protection of liberalism's own first principles has yet to be extended to them. And that liberals are therefore guilty of their immoral and intellectual vices that they associate with conservatives. So the social conservative will openly acknowledge his willingness to sacrifice social freedom, such as the right to abortion, to social order, right? We need order. Just as the economic conservative acknowledges his willingness to sacrifice equality for property rights. But by contrast, conservative attacks on liberals go to the core of liberalism's self-understanding. So conservative claims of cultural oppression seek to expose liberalism's core values, cultural diversity, tolerance, freedom of conscience, and social equality. These are all empty shams, disguising what is an entirely opposite set of commitments. And this is why liberals are criticized by their own standards. So George Will takes Walmart's critics to task, writing, liberals think their campaign against Walmart is a way of introducing the subject of class into America's political argument. And they are more correct than they understand. Their campaign is liberalism as condescension. It is a philosophic repugnance toward markets because consumer sovereignty results in the masses making messes. Liberals are gassed. See the choices Americans make with their dollars and their ballots announced. Yes, announced that Americans are surely in need of more supervision by liberals. So the PaleoCon Magazine chronicles, laments that once upon a time in America, you could say you loved your country, you believed in God, your held marriage is sacred, and you would not be snicked out as a simple-minded simpleton. You could believe in honesty, hard work and self-reliance. You could speak of human responsibilities in the same breath as human rights and not be derided as an insensitive fool. You could speak out against profane books. You could speak out against depraved movies and decadent art. You could express your disapproval of drug, sodden entertainers, American hating educators and appeasement obsessed legislators.  Yes, once upon a time in America, you'd actually believe in morality, both public and private, not be proclaimed a hopeless naïve, or to be pity than to be taken seriously. But that was before the censorship of fashion took control of contemporary American culture. So this insidious form of censorship is not written into our laws or statues, but it is woven into the very fabric of our culture. It reigns supreme in literature and the arts, on TV and in film and music, on radio, now churches, public schools, now universities and even in our synagogues. It is dedicated to the propagation of one agenda, the liberal activist agenda for America. The censorship of fashion is not only sinister and subtle, is also ruthlessly effective, employs the powerful weapons of ridicule and condescension to stifle the voices of millions of Americans like you to still cherish our traditional values. Reminding myself of that doesn't take much effort by just taking a break, taking a pause, just breathing and just saying damn, it's good to be alive. Because I won't always be alive. The right ends too quickly. So it's an opportunity, a moment to appreciate the entirety of it. I know this grates at your very essence, Chris. He's like an anti-Chris Kavanaugh. He's like a pure beam of love. But the thing is, it's not that I don't like being alive. I love it. I love it too. And there are moments when you're lying beside your kid, and you have those moments where you feel that gratitude of existence. You don't want this right then. I get it, Max. I get it. I'm happy here too. But this notion that recording a YouTube video, looking at a microphone, me like start to appreciate the absolute beauty of the world, the interconnectedness of it all. Like it's not that. It's just every day does that. He has that moment of, and it's after an hour of deep reading the deepest literature mankind has produced after 16 hours of physical work and productive time management done well fasted. I know what you're saying. I hear you. The American part of it is it's the American cultural disconnect. I'm not saying all Americans are like this. No, they're not. We've interviewed many of them and some of them listened to this show and it would rub them the wrong way just as much as us. But there is a segment. There is a segment for which this kind of emanating this childlike love and purity and naivety and these platitudes. There is an element in American culture for whom this is real and true. And there's just a difference there. There was an element there amongst the Puritans in Europe or amongst the spiritual mystics in Russia at various points in history. I think there's a mindset which is just full ball just dancing like nobody's watching. And it's just different. You said platitudes and that is part of what I feel. It's not that I think people shouldn't be grateful or reflect on how lucky they are, how marvelous it is that we live in this era of modern interconnectedness and all that. I do all the gays at me over your microphone and just felt grateful just for being here. I mean, in the nice version of it, they simply being grateful for all of the wonders that he gets to enjoy and for being alive. What's wrong with that? But it's that kind of platitudinous. It's combined with the Nazis. What bad guys? And life, it's a hell of a ride while you're on it and you've got to love people out there. It's just like it's all together. It feels like a saccharine overload of sincerity. It's hard for me. Where is the cynicism? And where is the grappling with the world as it is where it is not this beacon of love and wonder like every day is optimized to the core where people sleep in and they have depression and they're not optimized in everything they do.  And it's constraining the human spirit in a way. Well, I think what you're saying is it doesn't feel real. You should read.  But the main thing is that he's simple and pure in the sort of Christian sense. And Dostoyevsky was super into this kind of thing. And there's a cultural thing where they see it as an ennobling, being hyper aware, being encultured and being contaminated by society and going back to a kind of simplicity and a purity is a beautiful and good thing. And in a way, Lex's shtick is kind of embodies that. So there's that. Okay, I think that'll do it for today. Take care. Bye-bye.


It's been a long, long day. I got a lot to say. It feels like I'm carrying a two-ton weight. I go and see my friend. Hello, I'm Monsignor Patrick Winslow. And I am Father Matthew Couth. And we are speaking from the Rooftop, a podcast brought to you by Tan Books, in which we invite you to join our conversation out here in the open air, where we look out upon the world around us from the rooftop of the church and share with you what we see. Hello there. Greetings and welcome back to From the Rooftop. I got to say, the other day, I received a glorious little gift. Remember, I think we had one time in which someone gave us some mittens, hand and mittens and other things, remember? Oh yeah, because we're on the roof. Because of the roof. And someone dropped off a bottle of bourbon in case we got chilly up here, which I just thought was a great idea. I think it's a brilliant idea. So are you fishing? Shout out to that. No, no, no, no, no. One must stay sober. But you know, in the northeast, as a priest up there in upset New York, I would run into pressures at the liquor store. Because you have to buy your wine at the liquor store. You have to buy everything at the liquor store. You can't buy wine at the grocery store. You have to buy everything at the liquor store. So you run into all sorts of people and they're buying scotch and whiskey and bourbon and the stuff for the holidays as well as their wines. It was common to see a priest walk in and see all these people. I moved down here. Oh yeah. And people looked at me like I was in an adult bookstore. I was walking in to a liquor store. And I'm like, why am I getting glared at? And you would have thought I was in a place of ill repute. And it was such a cultural difference between the north and the south. That's true. There's so many counties here that are dry. So it's a complete difference between the northeast experience. You feel guilty, right? Because you think, okay, I am fulfilling the narrative of whatever this particular denomination is about a priest. So one time. But if they're in there, that's what I always said to myself. Yes. Wait a minute. If you're a particular denomination that has a problem with this, you shouldn't be in here either. Well, that's a good point. So it always elicited the comment or two from the person behind the counter. When you're the caller and I said, well, I come to where you work. You should come to where I work. Yeah, exactly. It's good. Do the invite. But you know, it's true. The cultural perceptions and these sorts of things. But what made me think about it is, you know, somebody giving the gift of like a bourbon or whatever. That was a very common gift in the northeast is to get a bottle. I think Scotch was very common. Scotch was more common than I think the clerical culture of Scotch up there was closer to Kentucky here. So that's true. It was a bourbon. But that was a very common. Do you remember though, this is probably one of my funniest moments ever in an ABC store. So to fill you all in, Father Winslow had just been assigned to a new parish. And what we try to do when a priest friend of ours gets assigned a new assignment is to not have them enter that assignment alone, because that's always a bit unnerving and unsettling.  And so we get everything set up and we're going to make some dinner together, etc. and spend the night and say some prayers and what have you. So invariably, you're looking to set up your bar, right? You want to make sure you have the drinks for the guys that come, whatever else. And so we went off to the ABC store, which is what the liquor store is down here in North Carolina. And we just got all the staples basically. So whoever came, they would have what they wanted. So all the basic staples. As soon as we called, we had to walk out to make a box. And so we had to walk out with a box. Like a big box. And it was clear that we were making an impression, right? Because here you are with, with, you know, four or five, six guys in a collar, and a significantly sized box to set up a bar. And instead of feeling embarrassed, because Father Winslow never feels embarrassed, instead of feeling embarrassed, he picks up the box, he picks up the box and walks out. He says to the guy behind the counter, see you next week. I do remember that now. It was my introduction to the ABC store. I'm the new pastor. I'll be here. See you next week. Next week as we walk out with a cart. Oh yeah. Well, you know, you know, one of the things I noticed or I've been attentive to recently in the prayers at mass, sometimes that's referred to in theological circles as ucology. That's the study of prayers. But I've noticed in the prayers at mass a reference to our Lord as His Majesty, that royal reference. And it makes sense this time of year, especially since we've celebrated the Feast of Christ the King to end the previous liturgical year. So that sense of moving toward the kingdom of God where our Lord is Prince and King of that new realm. So what struck me more recently is I found myself intrigued with some of these Asian dynasties. And in particular with their desire to see something divine in a princely figure. And then I contrast that with what I know about some of the Western sovereigns and our understanding divine, divine right monarchies coming out of the the Middle Ages and that way there was also that's something divine. But at least the divine right monarchy was the notion that at least the hand of God wanted that person governing that monarch governing. There was some connection there. Obviously, prescending from political theory and the blending of theology and governance, kind of separating those things out, just kind of separating not really entering into those things. The tendency or the human tendency or the notion to ascribe something close to the divine with a royalty. And now seeing these prayers and recognizing these prayers, I find it all very fascinating because I don't think that we think, generally speaking, of God and our Lord so often in majestic terms. I think the tendency of the modern era is to think of God in more spiritual language, more communal language, but not as your majesty. Yeah. Recognizing the dignity, the nobility of the one with whom we're engaging. I'm just I'm struck by it because it seems to me that there's something woven into our human nature that desires this or is oriented toward it. And we see it satisfied in the fulfillment of divine revelation and the person of Christ who sits at the right hand of the Father as the king of the universe. And this is not just sort of flowery language. This is what we talk about as a reality. For people don't like royal, you know, the whole royal phenomena, you're going to have to get over it relative to God, because that's the way it goes. There is a sovereign in heaven, right? There's no democracy. There is no democracy. There is a sovereign. And there's no escape in that. I think you're right. And I think that in the general movement toward egalitarianism in such a way that we would, we all want equal opportunities, right? And then that sort of begins to transfer into equal outcomes, which is a huge problem, right? Because it's not a merit system. It's not a hierarchical system. And everything down to the smallest microbin creation has always created hierarchies. And there's a reason for that, because there is a hierarchy. There's a hierarchy to being and there's a hierarchy inside of heaven itself. And you want, there's something that we long for about having that noble king to serve a Lord. We call him Lord all the time. But I think it's been evacuated of its context and its meaning. Like, do you ever think about him being a Lord when you say the word, oh, my Lord, or Lord help me with this? You don't think about him as being your Lord and so far as a king. And that thought struck me tremendously when I first went to seminary, because I was looking for an image in some ways to replace the image that I had gotten growing up. Because the image I had gotten growing up was that Jesus was basically a friend. But a friend that never really asked you to do anything and didn't really have any problems with anything you did, and who were really bad. The friend who was there for you. And you don't have to be there for him. If you wanted him, yeah. He never let you down. But you'd come to him when you needed him. And ultimately, he was wearing sort of a rather short cropped sort of rag sack thing with a belt and almost sort of Franciscan-esque in terms of imagination. And I remember distinctly, maybe this is too revelatory, but I remember distinctly sitting out in this field one time and I was looking at the sunset over these mountains in Colorado. And I recall my impression when I was a boy of Aslan being this lion that was the king. There are a lot of people that haven't. Yeah. So the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. He has, it was made into a movie not long ago, but Chronicles of Narnia were children's stories, but they're not just children's stories. They're certainly stories for adults too, in which these kids get pulled out of our world into a different world. And they meet this lion and this lion can talk and so can the animals, et cetera. But what's interesting about the lion is that, of course, the lion is Christ in a different world. And his name is? His name is Aslan. That's who you're referencing. And the lion that is throughout the book is that Aslan is not a tame lion, but he is good. And those two things kind of go together. And so I've been thinking about this relative and never made the connection when I was a kid that this even referred to Christ. Interesting. And thinking to myself that I never liked the image of Christ that I was given. And so even when I went up to receive first to the community, I pretended that it was Zeus up there giving me a lightning bolt. That's interesting. Because I wanted something that was more powerful than me, obviously. And so the thought about Aslan, that he's good, but he's tame, but he's good. He's not tame, but he's good. He's not tame, but he's good. So you're scared on the one hand to be in his presence, but he's good. And so you don't have to be at the same time. That difference between fear of the Lord and his majesty and the fact that anything he wills is going to be good. Long story short, I end up in this field in Colorado. And all of a sudden I had the distinct impression that the Son of God was next to me. It never happened to me before in my life that I was a kid. And I didn't turn, he was on my left side in my own mind. And I didn't turn because I had such a sense of his majesty. And I was so afraid of what I thought about him before and the way I had treated him, but the sense of the weight of his majesty, of his glory. And certainly it wasn't an experience like John and Patmos where he sees Christ, whom he had known so well. And his clothing is like wider than a fuller's lie and lightning coming at him as it were. And he's afraid.  And then interpreting that scene that happened to me, it completely transformed my thoughts about Christ. And all of a sudden it matched up with what I loved about Aslan. Never having known that Aslan was a figure of Christ. Yeah. So I resonate with that completely about his majesty. Because I always do think about his majesty from that moment on. Well, first of all, I would say as a methodological note, this is a perfect example of how you and I, we have conversations and we just circle something. Because I feel like I meandered and wandered in a circle when I queued up that topic. You were always one queume up though. Yeah, but it's the reason why I'm speaking kind of in a circle is because I I'm thinking I see something I'm thinking out loud and talking with you about it. So this is, you know, to be sure if someone said to say, well, he's not really teaching that point properly. Well, no, I'm thinking out loud. I'm really not. We're not teaching at all. No, we're, this is the whole ethos of this podcast. We're having a conversation. And it's just something that struck me. And as you know, certain things can strike us at certain times in different ways. And they become illuminating. Then you say to somebody, oh, did you ever think about that? Of course I've thought about that. But it somehow hits you in a way that you can't really articulate. Not that you see it better or more, but it's having an impact. And that's something you can't translate. Right? You can say to somebody, yeah, of course, he's the Lord of all. Yeah, of course. Of course, he is his majesty. But do you get it? Do you truly resonate with that reality? And the more you resonate and comprehend that reality, the more and more you're kind of saying, you know, you're nudging your friends saying, do you see this? Did you get that? Yeah, that's a good point. I wonder if we could flip it over for a second. In other words, we spoke last time about those kings that didn't get on with their spiritual life. And so they were stuck. They weren't allowed since they made God wait. God now makes them wait. Right. That's sort of their punishment before they go up to purgatory. I wonder what it's like to be a king. I mean, we have some saintly examples, right? Louis, Edward, St. Louis. By the way, he's one of my grandfathers. He's not your relative. No, he is. Just because you do a DNA test and you find out that you've got French blood does not mean that you're related to St. Louis. Proven Winslow? The Winslow family. This is why he's now interested in royalty, everyone. I do anticipate a certain amount of certainty. Yeah, we're in an interregnum right now. There's no king on the throne. But what was it? The saints that we do have that were kings, like we read in the bravery. If you're a priest or a deacon or a lay person, you read the bravery of Elizabeth Hungary. They typically will give us a letter for something that they wrote. The most beautiful one, of course, is St. Louis to his son. Right. And of course, St. Louis's spiritual director and confessor was St. Thomas Aquinas. St. Thomas Aquinas. Just get that in there. That's true. So that means that my patron… He was not very successful at the Crusades. My patron? Well, that's fine. His success is different, right? That's true. But a beautiful letter from one of my grandfathers to his son, another one of my grandfathers. It does mean that my patron was over your patron. Yes. Just say it. Yes. Well, there is that. But he's definitely not one of your grandfathers. Well, that's true. Yeah, that's true. But his spiritual father. Yeah. You see in those letters, that they realize that they're stewards. You know, like they might have the title King. Right. But kind of like Lord of the Rings, Gerard Tolkien, he's got that steward of Gondor. He's not the real King. And you have to give way when the real King shows up that every one of us on whatever level that we have any authority is a steward. And the reason I say flip it over, don't you think that the reason that we sort of want to be able to have the noble King and we want to use terms like Lord and Majesty and everything else is because we realize that I don't want to rule everything. I'm not capable of ruling everything. Matter of fact, I find it to be terribly burdensome. But to know that you had someone up there that you could actually serve, I think it's hitting upon something in our nature, the very way in which we have been made to just do that. We've been made to serve the highest King. With the knowledge that the King, if we serve him well, is the one who then guards himself and has a sit at table and serves us. But I don't want the responsibility of running everyone else's life. You might think I do. Oh, because you do. At least around here you do. That's my job here. You're my only visit.  Just like I said, you know, I'm with these kings, yeah, exactly, there's a certain sense of being honored by it. Mind you guys, just you should know that in his office, where he tries to run everyone else's life in the diocese, he has a massive picture he had paid Van Gogh, right? El Greco of St. Louis. It's a devotional. To tell everyone basically that this is my grandfather. He's holding a sister. Just so you know. And with his son next to him, it's a devotional. Thank you very much. And that son is your father, probably. They're all my grandfathers. So, yes, it's a devotional. My father was very pleased to see that. That you got the family tree in there. Yes, he's very proud of that. Who grafted that onto there. He's very proud of that. My mother will be the first to point out the fact that it's by no merit of his that he has a saint in the family. The saint does not get passed down the bloodline. No, it does not. It does not. So, okay. So we're honored. Like when we know famous people and we say, well, you know, so-and-so and it's connected to so-and-so. We do this always in the fabric of society and in our social lives. And we have just an intuitive sense that the glory of that person is going to flow onto us. But when it comes to God and approaching him and his majesty, what is so attractive is to recognize that the place that he's afforded us is to be a noble in his court. Yes. Yes. And that is an elevation from what we intuitively sense is our natural state. And so there's something about that implication of royalty and the nobility that is bestowed upon us. That we react to and respond to and are drawn toward in part because we're recognizing that on a natural level, it's not ours. But it is a gift to us. And to be able to claim, I am part of this noble royal court. Yes. And we've got to reclaim that. I mean, liturgically, we've tried to reclaim it, right? We certainly have in this diocese in many ways. Try to make sure that what we're doing with the king, liturgically, has that sense of nobility. Because we're ushered into those things. And if you think about the words that we now use, sort of post-Vatican II relative to the faith, we often talk about them as those who enjoy the royal priesthood. Right. We don't say the indentured servant priesthood. Right, right. That's us. It's a nobility. Right. Well, that's it. Exactly. That is us. That's true. And I want to say, too, that tendency or that natural attraction toward that sense of nobility in a human sovereignty or a human monarchy is fraught with problems. It makes no sense that the royal family of England or the royal family of this country, or for that matter, the royal family of these Asian empires throughout the ages, that they are somehow more dignified than any other person. Or that they earned or merited anything. They're just born. Yeah, they might not have merited, but they were supposed to keep the our stay, right? I mean, they were supposed to translate the excellence. They were. Of and to be able to embody that, because we all do need to look up to someone. But so often they didn't. Sure. No, no question. They did the precise opposite. I mean, they did really the opposite.  Often times. And this is the tension, right? They would be people who would be born into a royal family with the play they're not free to be who they want to be. And at the same time, they'd be showered with all these trappings and influence and so on and so forth. But at the same time, the people demanded something from them. And they wanted to see, as you say, the excellence. Or even just they want to see a show of power or a show of good governance or whatever. Benevolence. It's true. We cannot live without it. Right. It's what it is, but the right end is the sovereignty of God. And that is the right end. But without God, look how violent and hideous it looks in human history. In human history. Because it turns into either very egocentric, condescending type of monarchy. An atheist state is ultimately a self-defication state. Yeah. I mean, it looks the same way. It's just in different shapes and patterns. And other people are just completely disposable. Yeah, but I just want to make sure it's clear out there that I'm not saying that I'm not making any claim on the goodness of royal families. Oh, I'm all about monarchies. I'm totally into monarchies. That's why you're going to surrender yourself to my royal lineage through the plantations. My noble leash. Yes. No, it's true. I mean, at the end of the day, does anything inspire? And again, because it doesn't become incarnate and because we have an experience, it doesn't mean it's not real. Because it's pointing, it's like a fairy tale. It's pointing at something that is real, which is the heavenly court. But separated from that reality, it can rot. So why do you love Cinderella? Like, why do you love, why do the stories about paupers being raised up to princesses and proper kings and happily ever after? And why does Disney take the Nosh Van Stein and place it in the middle of Florida or California or wherever and say, wow, doesn't this draw people? It does. Even if Ludwig, who built Nosh Van Stein was a complete, I think he was a rather big crazy man. But nevertheless, you looked up to the castle. Like, you looked up to these things and said, I want to be part of something because you're made to be, as you said, part of the noble court. I think that's really, I think the right exercise is to say, okay, when I look at royalty and sovereignty and say, everything that is extraordinary about that, take it and apply it to God. And then recognize that you've been invited to be a part of his noble court. And that's the thing that when we talk about looking at the dignity of other people, regardless of their state in life, and this is where you rail against the whole notion of some people being better than other people, nobility being better than serfs. That kind of thinking, we would say, no, that's an absurdity. It has to be merit-based. And in this case, we're talking about the level of dignity imparted by God, all of you are called to be nobles in that royal court. And your rank among them is going to be much, it's going to be discerned to a far greater degree regarding your goodness and your response to grace than anything to do with the state to which you've been born in this world or in this life, or in this society. But when you approach people and have conversations with people, I think it would be interesting as an exercise as a Christian, just to say, this is an acre of God's sovereign kingdom. And this is the noble entrusted with that land. Who are you? Who are you? And every person then becomes cloaked in that majesty. And how do you treat the people that you quote-unquote subjects, but the ones you ultimately serve, right? I think it's interesting that because this is in the human heart, because we gravitate toward it in fairy tales and everything else, and you can't really eradicate it, it's that which creates the sort of the romance of who you actually were made to be this Cinderella story. And at the same time, instead of eradicating, as we tend to do now, the authorities, the pageantry, the royalty, whatever else, instead of just like getting rid of them, which is what we do now, holding them to what they're supposed to be and demanding it in some ways of them, which also means a kind of pietas, that I recognize that as a Catholic, this probably was one of the great things about having a Catholic nation in some ways, is that as a Catholic, I will give you the deference that you are due as the ruler of this land, knowing that you're a steward and a god, but we're both going to kneel down at the same altar rail to the king of kings. Right.  Right, I think you talked about this as the level of playing field being the confessional line, that you would have the movers and shakers of a town with the least influential standing in the same line. And so in other words, I guess you could say that the same line as Augustine you could say as a king, like with you, Saint Augustine says, I am a sheep, but for you I am a shepherd. And the faithful should make their shepherds, whether they be secular or ecclesial, they should hold them up in honor. But that honor means be what you're made to be right now. Like this is the role you've been given and do it with the kind of ability. I'll do my role right now, because I might be in your place someday. I might be the one who's the shepherd. But wherever I am right now to be noble in that field. Right, to rise to the occasion and be authentic. And that's the great reversal there of, or as you mean, counterintuitive, which is the greatest of all is the servant of all. To ascend is to descend. And it's that paradox where that nobility is found ultimately in a nobility of love and in any event, without going too far because then we're kind of running to the end of things. And it's not the right moment to start swirling around another topic. We'll do that next time. Yes, we should talk about love. But we should. I am the doctor of love, right? That's true. That's what they always make fun of me as. Your doctor is an understanding of divine charity. Yes, because those who study. Don't even finish that sentence. So, before we go. Can't. Some of you are going to go out and get trees. Yes. I have two things I have to say. Let me go in and get out. Some of us have already gotten some trees. Some have already gotten trees. Please, for the love of God, let it be real. Right? And number two, no blue-ish kind of garish white lights. Oh, those are horrible. They have to be soft. They have to be flame-like, right? They have to be. Incandescent. I mean, X, absolutely. You have to look. The LEDs have not arrived. Get closer. Rare is the LED that has that warm flame-like color. If you want to create the atmosphere, it's got to imitate fire. Don't set your tree on fire. But you got to imitate it. That's what I'm saying before we go. I'm in agreement. That's a really good one. For me, it's also about scent. I love the pine scent. Absolutely. You know those pine cones that you came in? The pine cones, the candle. The diffuser, I'm happy with too. This modern fangled thing where you're diffusing. Basically, it's a humidifier with oil in it. Right? So, give me some pine oil on that thing. And it just smells so beautiful and lovely. Fantastic. We'll end here, but once we were living in a rectory together, I'd say, Thomas, as many of you know, and we had a tree that was so old and dead, but we refused to take it down. It was almost March. We just loved the Christmas tree. It was beautiful light in the morning. We went out and bought pine spray. It kept spraying. So, it smelled so much. And it turned. No needles left on it. Oh, gosh. I mean, you'd brush against it and a thousand needles would fall. The poor woman who came in to clean. We almost got it to Easter. We did. I think if we put anything, any flame close in seconds, it would go up. Gone. Absolutely.  Oh, it's great. These things go up like that. Yeah, with all those trees, those high, high tall trees, and they go up in a second. It's a wonder there were more house burnings with Christmas tree. That's true.  No, not because the modern light is so safe.  It's true. I mean, how many cats have burnt hoofs because they touched or they remember the cats, they would go at it and they get burnt. But two, as a kid, I would touch them. I know. I remember. The bubble one? Remember the bubble one? The bubble what? The liquid inside would bubble up. Oh, yeah. They're still on those again. Are they really? So, I'm in the store. They're probably retro now. Yeah, the retro. Yeah.  As a kid, we had tinsel. Did you do tinsel?  Tinsel. Tinsel. I mean, it was so much fun, though. I hated it. The cat would eat the tinsel and then recycle it. Yeah, well. I mean, that was another issue. With these noble thoughts. Yes. We'll let you all go. Yes, we'll let you go. Have a great week. All right, sounds good. Thanks for listening to this episode of From the Rooftop. For updates about new episodes, special guests, and exclusive deals for From the Rooftop listeners, sign up at rooftoppodcast.com. And remember, for more great ways to deepen your faith, check out all the spiritual resources available at tanbooks.com. And we'll see you again next time. From the Rooftop.