Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
So I always enjoy conversations that I have no earthly idea how to describe. And today's fits into that mold. It's a conversation with my colleague Ross Douthat. He's the author of 'Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious,' a book I enjoyed very much, even though quite a bit of it. I had some questions about. And he's the host of the new and really excellent New York Times Opinion podcast 'Interesting Times' — very interesting times, in fact, where he has been interviewing people on the modern American. And this is a conversation about belief, as it is intertwined with the Trump administration and with this moment of politics, return of political mysticism and the belief as it operates in our lives. Ross's argument that we should all that I should be an organized religion, and me talking about some things I did not expect to be talking about on today's show. As always, my email at nytimes.com. Ross Douthat, welcome to the show. it is a pleasure to be here. So last year, after the first assassination attempt on Donald Trump, you wrote about Trump as a man of destiny that he was, quote, a figure touched by the gods of fortune in a way that transcends the normal rules of politics. How are you thinking about that now. Well, there were other passages in that column that are worth emphasizing. But yeah, I stand by that reading of the Trump phenomenon. I think one of the ways in which my sense of politics generally has changed over the course of the Trump era is just I have more appreciation for weird forces that are outside, certainly outside the control of people who write about politics. You can't have lived through the Trump era as a conservative columnist or newspaper writer, and not have the sense of how fundamentally unimportant columnists are to what happens in American politics. Consistent it's a consistent exercise in humility. It is. Well, but even but even beyond that, I think and I both grew up in a period that was, I think, reasonably described as a kind of time out from Grand historical dramas. It was not the end of history in a totalizing sense, but the kind of Francis Fukuyama view of the post-cold war era as one that had a certain kind of predictability and order and history under control. History felt under control. And the reality is that much of human history is just not under control in that way. And there are forces that move through history generally, forces that move through history that are of hard to predict and assess. But I do think often they are connected to specific personalities, and there is some kind of marriage between. Particular personalities and particular moments. And the idea of a man of destiny. A great man of history is a useful way of thinking about that when it happens, as I think it has happened with Donald Trump, the rise of populism, the crackup of the liberal order, and so on. The reason I laughed at the outset is that it's important to stress that someone can be a man of destiny and be bad, right. Someone can be a great man of history and be worth opposing. You can look back at Napoleon and say, man, he was above and beyond in terms of historical forces and also root for Wellington at Waterloo. That's O.K. How does the sense that Trump is a man of destiny. Because I agree with you. And I think understanding the interpretation of Trump is somehow mystic is very important to understanding his relationship now with the right. But specifically, how do you think it has changed the way his staff and his allies treat him. I mean, I think that it is very hard to go through the drama that Trump himself personally went through in the world that ran. I mean, we can go back further, but let's just say the world that ran from January 6 through his return to power. And if you're on his side through that story, not come away with the feeling that you were moving with the wave of history. For people in Trump's circle, this sense of 1, 1, there's just a sense that it doesn't matter what the polls say or the naysayers say. Certainly doesn't matter what, squishy New York Times' conservatives say, right, they saw the bottom. Trump was disgraced and ruined and persecuted, and he was going to be sent to jail. And then the next thing Assassin's bullets were missing him by a hair's breadth. And he was making this incredible, unprecedented historical comeback. And having lived through that, I think it's hard to be swayed by people saying, hey, guys, your poll numbers are not looking so great. This tariff rollout, not that well thought out. What are the implications of sending people to Salvador without due process. Those are normal, quotidian sounding objections to administration policy. And I think, at least for some people caught up in the Trump phenomenon, they just seem incommensurate to the reality that you're like riding, riding a historical wave. But I don't think it's just the external world and its judgment of Donald Trump. And you can tell me if you think this is wrong. But I think one of the biggest differences between Trump one and Trump 2 is that in Trump one, his own staff, the people who surrounded him were perfectly comfortable thinking President Donald Trump is very wrong about this, that his judgment is bad. His impulses need to be foiled. We are the resistance inside the Trump administration and in Trump two, I don't think people around him are comfortable thinking that. I think there is both a sense that they are there to serve him, but also a sense that there is something in Trump to them, not to me, that exists beyond argumentation. The fact that the tariff policy doesn't make sense on its face, the fact that what he's doing seems like a bad idea. Well, if you knew better, then you'd be in the chair. And so the unwillingness to question him because there's a belief in either a mystic purpose to him or that he has a mystic like beyond argumentation, intuition about things I think has really changed the nature of the constraints around him, or the absence of constraints around him. Yeah, I think there's also a way in which mystic drama of his return to power is also projected back onto his first term. So where the experience of Trump's first term, not just for liberals and Democrats, but for a lot of Republicans, was obviously chaotic and bizarre and difficult. And so on. But there were ways in which the results of that term were better than people anticipated. I think certainly they were better than I anticipated. I expected again, as a columnist observer economic crisis and foreign policy crisis to define Trump's first four years in office. And prior to COVID, they didn't. The economy was in good shape. I think you can make a case that his foreign policy in the first term worked better than Biden's. I think you can make a strong case, actually, that it worked better than Biden's foreign policy. And I think what's happened now is that not just people around him in the White House, but also congressional Republicans, people who would have doubts about the tariffs and so on have combined the mystical drama with surprisingly successful first term record, put them together and said it's both that Trump has some kind of mystic intuition about what to do. And it's also that we doubted him before, but it all worked out O.K. Now, obviously the problem with that is that one of the reasons it worked out O.K was precisely that there were a bunch of people in the White House the first time around who didn't have a mystical sense of Trump's his goals or anything like that. And that is, I think, very clearly what is missing this time around. There are people in the White House who could play that role. I think a lot of people expected, Scott percent, the Secretary of the Treasury, or Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, to play the kind of role that Gary Cohn and Steve Mnuchin and HR McMaster played in the first term. But no one is actually playing that role as far as anyone can see. And so, in an odd way, the Yeah, the very success of Trump as man of destiny is unmaking the conditions that made his first term, a success, but that is itself like a dramatic arc. Like if you were writing oh, it's all very different. You were writing if you're writing the novel of the story of hubris. And nemesis, that would be a characteristic way that hubris and nemesis would manifest themselves. Well, we tend to think of fortune now as synonymous with luck. But you go back to Greek mythology, and when you are touched by fortune, when you get a fortune, when you speak to the Oracle, it often doesn't work out that well. You get a clear prophecy that seems like it foretells your success. And laced inside of that is your downfall. I think what kind of story. What kind of mystic structure you believe we're in. Is it one that is providential? Or is it one where the gods often laugh at human design. Well, I mean, I think a mistake that I think some religious people make is to see a kind of force of destiny at work in a particular figure and assume that force of destiny must mean that God, the author of history, wants you to be on that person's side directly. But in fact, if you read, let's say, the Old Testament. There's all kinds of moments when God is working through figures to accomplish something in the world, or to move history or the drama, the drama of salvation history, to put it in Christian terms, right in a particular direction. But it doesn't mean that the instrument that God is working through is, in fact, the Messiah or the chosen one, right. Like if God sends the Babylonians to chastise the wicked Kings of Israel, it doesn't mean that you're supposed to necessarily say Oh, hail Nebuchadnezzar. You are. You are the chosen one. Sometimes there are forces, I think. I think you can see Trump in several different lights. You could say he's a man of destiny, and therefore he is bringing about in some weird way that we didn't see coming, the new American golden age. And this is obviously what a lot of people are on the center, right. Wanted to believe, especially when it became clear that he was returning to power. Or you could say he's a great man of history who's unlocking some change that was necessary. But bringing chaos in order to do it right. So, I wrote a lot about the concept of decadence. This idea that the West, the developed world, was stuck in these kind of cycles and needed to break out somehow. But the reality is often can't break out of decadence without a big, big mess. So maybe Trump is the agent of that mess, but it doesn't mean, a good person. Or finally, it could just be chastisement for everyone. All are punished. As Shakespeare said, I think all of those possibilities have to be taken seriously as readings of the Trump phenomenon. How well do you remember Batman begins. I remember it, but so as a person, the League of shadows, right. Destroying Gotham. I've had this joke in my head often in the past couple of months. As somebody whose mythic analogies tend to come from the Marvel or DC universe more than the old or the New Testament. There's just like, convinced me we're not being governed by the League of shadows. And I went back and I rewatched the piece where Ra's Ghul reveals the whole plan. And he says, look, we've infiltrated every layer of Gotham's power structure. The League of shadows has been a check against human corruption for thousands of years. We sacked Rome, loaded trade ships with plague rats, burned London to the ground. Every time a civilization reaches the pinnacle of its decadence, we return to restore the balance. We tried to do this through financial engineering and destroy Gotham's economy. It didn't quite work. Now we're back for number two. And the fact that we are here is proof of your decadence, right. The fact that we could do this, get this close shows that you deserve what we are about to do to you. Yes And I'm not saying we are actually being governed by the League of shadows. But when you brought up the decadence, there is a dimension of that to me when you think about this in those almost like narrative terms, a reflection of very dark sides of our own society. Well, and I mean, I've carried on a couple of different running arguments throughout the Trump era that are going to continue, I guess. And one is with people on the right who have a League of shadows view of the overall situation. It's like things, things are so bad that you might as well unleash chaos, right. And this you saw a lot of this in response to the tariffs. People mostly on social media. Not real politicians don't say this, but people on social media who are like, fine, we need a 10 year reset of the whole global economy because things are so bad and so on. And I spent a lot of time disagreeing with those people. I would prefer not to take the black pill. But I've also spent time disagreeing with the kind of liberals and sometimes, never-trump Republican critics of Trump, who I feel like don't quite grasp why he's successful and what you need to do in response, because I don't think he could be this successful if well, if it were enough to just elect Joe Biden to fix, to fix our problems. Well, clearly that didn't work. It didn't work. We tried that and definitely tried to elect him twice to fix our problems was not the winning move. I was saying a couple of months ago to Barry Weiss's podcast, and she had Louise Perry, who's a British conservative gender and sexuality writer. And Perry made this argument that I've been thinking about where she said that the difference between Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate is that Peterson is a Christian and Tate is a pagan. And I think this might be unfair to historic pagans, but the argument she is making depends on it depends on the pagans, but also depends on the Christians. But the argument she was making is that Peterson is, at least in his ethic, somebody who thinks A lot about the week, who cherishes women. Tate is more interested in power, in dominance in driving his enemies before him and fathering a lot of children from a lot of people, potentially. And I've thought about that question, that war between, again, crude paganism and Christianity as really playing out right now on the right. And in the Trump administration, there are ways in which those strands seem braided through everything. The drive for power, for a renewed 19th century masculinity versus the more Christian dimensions of it. There's, in a way Vance as an emblem of the Christian side of the administration. Musk is an emblem of its pagan side with his many kids from many different women. Trump is somebody who, in his both traditionalism like as a person and also his brashness and will to power as a person has both threads inside himself at the same time. Maybe, I think I mean, honestly, I think Trump may have come to some conception of belief in God after the assassination attempt. I just observing his comments a little bit. But I think of Trump as just persistently as a kind of pagan or heathen figure, much more than he is than he is a Christian figure, notwithstanding the attempts to claim him as a kind of King David or Emperor Constantine. There's an idea that you get from religious conservative supporters of Trump that you have these figures in the Bible or Christian history who are rulers, who are sinful in various ways, but maybe in a way like I've been describing advance God's cause despite their sins and failings. I don't really think of Trump that way, but he is committed in an explicit way to Christianity and Trump. To me, the bargain with Trump has always been for religious conservatives, some mix of protection and support, a transactional bargain, and then more recently, a kind of hope that some kind of renewal of American dynamism can bring religion itself back with it, which I will say is a hope that I have indulged, indulged in myself that it's like, O.K, you have different varieties of Christianity out there, and you don't want to ally with the Andrew Tates, but you do want to ally with the people who have, big hopes for the future rather than a woke progressivism. That just seems inflected with cultural despair, that would be an argument that I think a Christian who was trying to explain to themselves how they find themselves in alliance with Elon Musk might say, right. Like, better. Elon, who has some good desires and believes that humanity is good in some way and wants a more dynamic future, better that than pure pessimism. The climate change is going to kill us all, and structural racism means we deserve it kind of perspective that would be the argument. Let me ask you about the idea that what you just described, though, is pure pessimism. Putting aside the idea that climate change will kill us all, which I don't believe, I think most people, even on the left, don't believe. They believe there's a way out. You just have to really work for it. You give at the end of your book an account of why you're a Christian and why you're a Catholic, and why you find it persuasive. And I find your account of it very moving. It's a thing that appeals to me about Christianity. And the account you give is about both the strangeness and the radicalism of Jesus Christ as a figure. How uncomfortable it is to read him. How challenging, how it's a religion about meekness. All of the rich man has a better chance of the camels, a better chance of fitting through the eye of the needle than the rich man of getting into heaven that there's always been a radicalism in that. And I Yeah, I mean, I know the Meeke will inherit the Earth is a famous line. I would say renunciation more than meekness. But there's a godliness of those who do not have power Yes And at the same time, then there is this administration I think is very self-consciously tries to be frame itself as Christian, but people in it are like JD Vance. And many, many people in the administration do not see in them in the way they act in this world, this love of those who do not have power. There's the kind of putting out of memes where they've made a Studio Ghibli meme out of an immigrant crying. There's something about the interplay here of a self-conscious Christianity and a self-conscious, mimetic cruelty that both feels like very appalling to me, but also unchristian, as I understand it. Yeah Yeah. I mean, I think the Christian, the aspect of populism. Conservative populism, right wing populism, whatever you want to call it, that does see itself in clear continuity with Christian ideas and Christian views, basically holds that it is speaking on behalf of the weak and the oppressed people who don't have a voice in society. And those people are the native born working class of the Western world who have been asked to bear inappropriate burdens, beginning with economic. I'm just framing the case. Right Beginning beginning with the economic burdens imposed by Free trade regimes that sent their jobs overseas and continuing with the burden of. Again, this is the argument of social disorder and breakdown associated with the drug trade in a globalized world, the free movement of peoples that transforms cities and neighborhoods and in ways that, again, fall most heavily on lower middle class Americans and are of avoided and evaded by the upper class. This is the narrative is basically that the beneficiaries of globalization are the equivalent of the rich person in various of Jesus's parables. And certainly Jesus does not hesitate at various moments in the Gospels to say pretty harsh things about people who have betrayed their leadership role. So one reason I pushed back on meekness is Yes, Jesus uses the word meek, but Jesus himself is not a meek figure. And you can go through the New Testament and find plenty of cases where Jesus says incredibly harsh things about powerful. Mostly about powerful people. About sinners. Where Jesus cleanses the temple and drives, drives the moneylenders out and curses the fig tree that doesn't bear fruit. You're moving. You're moving to the powerful here. What I'm asking about is the treatment of the powerless, which, even if you believe and I don't contest this point that many, many, many people in this country have borne undue burdens. Like, I understand that as central to liberal politics, too. It is the cruelty with which poor immigrants are treated. The kind of laughing about it that it's fine if you want to say they should be unkind to a New York Times' columnist, I more mean that there is an embrace of mimetic cruelty, not aimed at the powerful, but aimed at other forms of the powerless, where as I understand the radicalism of this ethic, it is that you should whether whatever your border policy, there should be a profound compassion for Haitians who came here fleeing some of the most desperate poverty in the world to work hard at jobs to build up a life for their families. There's something about the weaponization of cruelty against the powerless. It is what I am trying to get at. No and I think as I said before, I think you have what you're describing as Christian and pagan tendencies braided together in the Trump administration. And I think that but many of the things that you describe absolutely reflect more of a pagan sensibility than a Christian one. But I agree with you that particular steps the Trump administration has taken in this term are not Christian, anti-Christian. And I think the forces, I mean, I think it started with the cuts to foreign aid. I think you can completely justify some kind of renovation of the foreign aid program. Christians are not bound to support any particular set of programs. But I think the way in which the foreign aid programs were reshuffled and cut off and so on, was a failure of Christian duty in a pretty obvious way. That and the core motivations there were just different from the motivations, the evangelical motivations of the Bush era and reflected, frankly, just overall the decline of Christianity in American life since then. I will just say, though since we're taking a pretty hard line of critique, I think you watch this happen all the time on the left in different ways over the last five or five or 10 years, where people who I considered sensible, good, well-meaning, moderate people were in a coalition with people who had more intensity, more passion, more zeal, who made a certain set of demands on them. That led, again, people I knew and admired and respected to I think, compromise their own values in ways that also had of real world material consequences. I don't want to relitigate, I don't want to relitigate wokeness. But if I think this is part of the nature of politics in a landscape where there's no kind of religious consensus, there's no kind of moral consensus, right. Is that forces that appear to have energy behind them. Again, to go back to where we started, world historical energy, perhaps, will draw people who have convictions that should put them in tension with those views into certain kinds of compromises. But I agree, I absolutely think I do not admire the way that the Trump administration approaches any of the policies that you're talking about from humanitarian aid to the deportations to Salvador. I guess, to me, one of the things I'm getting at in life broadly, but in the policies specifically or in the rhetoric, in the comportment, I think a lot about JD Vance, who's a person in many ways, I think should have had some protection from this. I think he is Christian. I think he does think a lot about virtue and ethics. And you brought up the tariffs. I don't there's anything on Christian about the tariffs. I think they're bad economics, not bad religion. And a lot of these policies I actually believe that about I think people can have very mistaken views on policy because they are just wrong about what the policies will do in the world. I have had mistaken views on policies because I was wrong about what the policies would do in the world, or the they would be carried out. It's more the compatibility between what I think has become a dominant tone, and I think we're in a unstable era in terms of what I might call our political manners. Matt yglesias had a piece about the way a lot of his Hitler revisionism is beginning to happen, out of a kind of feeling that we have over penalized questions about race, questions of anti-Semitism, and that in order to widen the boundaries of debate, you have to have on World War II revisionists. And there's a sense that this politics of manners didn't work. And so politics of no manners needs to be tried now. And I think Donald Trump has been an innovator and a pioneer in that. And it's created a lot of memetic imitators who, on the hand, don't have some of his I don't lightness or authenticity or funniness, but on the other, it's just that I think I am, weirdly, even though I'm not myself religious, a little bit idealistic about religion, I feel about my own religion, which I think should create very profound sympathy for refugees. And that has not been something I've seen in the past couple of years. And I think it's a Christianity where it feels to me like it should create a kind of buffer against greed and cruelty that I often see broken when it would be politically viable to break it. So Well, 2, two things. One is that, Yes, you are describing the story of both Judaism and Christianity's engagement with history and fallen human nature. And this is something that is, in fact advertised in both the Old Testament and the New Testament and all of history since. Is that the story of the Jewish people in the Old Testament is not a story of people who are chosen by God and given a bunch of Commandments, and then obeyed them all to story of people who remain, the chosen people, despite failing in every possible way, including to fit our conversation, repeated flirtations with heathenism and paganism and idolatry. And then you can obviously tell a similar story. The New Testament Christians don't have political power, but the apostles are always screwing up and Messing up. And then, of course, the history of Christianity is entanglement with political power is filled with sins and failings that, again, this era's set, are of not atypical, I guess. But then the second point that I want to push you on is, what kind of argument is this that you think you're going to win with religious believers who disagree with you. You're like, well, I don't believe in your religion, but I really wish that you would follow your religion so that your politics were more aligned with mine. Like, that's just not much of an argument at all. And I think to the extent that all of liberalism, the ideology that you subscribe to trades on inherited ideas from Christianity about morality and equality and so on, while you've jettisoned the portrait of the universe, the metaphysical structure that gives them meaning. I think it's really hard from that point of view for you to get anywhere in arguments with people who still believe in that structure, because you're essentially saying, I've stripped away the conceptual framework that makes your moral ideas make sense. But now I'm going to complain that you're not living up to your moral ideas. I just think that's a really weak argument. Oh, but I'm not arguing it. Well, you're saying it to me. I'm right here. I'm a Christian. I'm right here. You're arguing. You're expressing sorrowful disappointment that Christians are not living up to a worldview that you think is false. Well, I think parts of it are. Well, I am unconvinced on parts of it. We'll talk about the view of the cosmos in a minute. And I'm not trying to offend you here. I'm actually asking what Ezra has anything about. Our long relationship suggests that you could possibly offend me. I've known you long enough to know when you're getting a bit heated. That's totally different headedness. I mean, as I was saying, the New Testament is filled with heated encounters. I don't think a thing I'm saying here is going to convince somebody on the Christian right to turn around their view of Donald Trump. I am genuinely curious how somebody of your politics and your religious background interprets somebody like JD Vance. So I'm asking you questions about it. Christianity does not provide some kind of incredibly strong bulwark against powerful people doing the kinds of things that powerful people do, which means self-interested conquest of various kinds and so on. What it does provide is an ongoing internal critique that those powerful people have to wrestle with and address in ways that are fairly unique in the historical relationship of power and piety. So if you look at something like, to take the most famous example, maybe the Spanish conquest of the Americas, right. In terms of what is actually done in the course of the Spanish conquest of the Americas. You can find, plenty of terrible crimes that you, would say, well, what good is your religion, if it licenses. If your civilization commits these kind of crimes. But from the very beginning, in Spain itself, in the heart of super Catholic, counter-reformation era Spain, there's an ongoing and agonizing and sometimes intensely legal and practical, sometimes high level philosophical theological debate that subjects the behavior of the Spanish conquistadors and others to this kind of sustained critique and leads to at various times, sometimes successful, mostly unsuccessful reform efforts driven by the Catholic monarchy of Spain and ultimately builds out and influences everything from the anti-slavery movement in the 18th and 19th century that's ultimately successful, down to contemporary ideas about human rights and international law. That, again, today's secular liberals take for granted as a kind of scripture. All of that emerges out of the efforts of serious Christians in a context of profound historical temptation and constant sinfulness, to generate from within the resources of their religion. And I think if you take the Trump administration, for instance, it's not as though you cannot find Christian critiques of Trump administration cruelty. They just are not at the moment the primary thing I would expect. I mean, we'll find out. We're three months into a kind of shock and awe administration. I think that and people have been, I think people have been baffled and surprised by some of the turns that things have taken. But certainly people I take seriously within conservative Christianity have spoken out against things like, the cuts to humanitarian aid or anything like that. But again, I completely agree with you that history supplies constant tests of what your religion is for, and there's no end until the end, right to the testing. And sometimes, sometimes you succeed. More often you fail. But hopefully you do something that has good effects down the road, and sometimes you fail entirely. And then maybe God sifts you and finds you wanting. I'm not kidding here. This is actually like it is important to see every moment as a potential moral test that you might well be failing. I am a conservative Christian. You could say I'm a member of the Christian right for your purposes. As Christianity has weakened in American life, a really hard question has become who is the most dangerous of your different enemies or who is most threatening to the Christian view of the good society. Is it a woke progressivism that wants to. Again, this would just be the narrative, right. I think it wants to abolish basic ideas about differences between the sexes that supports abortion at any stage in pregnancy. That's hostile to the basic religious liberties of Christians. Again, from the conservative Christian point of view, is it. Donald Trump's populism with its heathen cruelties? Is it transhumanism like, is the final boss of this era that religious believers will have to confront? Actually Silicon Valley. And if it is like, can you make alliances within Silicon Valley. Is it better to be with Elon Musk and his 117 children than to be with, some other people involved. So Neuralink is it's pushing transhumanism forward very fast, if it can. That's no, there's a lot of. But there's also different transhumanism like which what. Anyway, all I'm all no, these are actually these are things, that I myself am profoundly uncertain about in this moment Like who. What is the greatest danger from a Christian perspective to the future of the human race. I'm not entirely sure. So a big part of your book, as I read it, is about what happens when elite society becomes hostile in its view of the world, to the human impulse to seek a picture of reality that runs deeper than materialism. What happens when the seekers have nowhere to go. When organized religion weakens? When or not know where to go. What happens when they are not channeled into organized religion. And what happens when elite society becomes too materialistic? And I understand for you, and you can tell me if this is wrong, that one of the forces I think that you believe is driving the era is a kind of frustrated, seeking a desire to re-enchant the world like that has run into an elite culture, maybe its apex being the Obama administration and that moment in American life. It's the Ezra apex. Ezra, let's be honest here, although that well, we'll get into this. I always joke that the difference between you and me is more that I'm you're a Catholic and I'm a Californian than that I'm a materialist, and you're not. Because but one can use the word materialist in different ways to 1, when you use it in this context. What do you I mean, the view that all of existence, life, the universe, and everything is finally reducible to matter in motion, that matter is primary and mind is secondary rather than the other way around. I don't mean materialism in terms of Madonna's material girl or something like that, although the two can be connected. So one of the various arguments in my book. Is that disenchantment is fake, fundamentally right. The idea that you can enter a secular. Age where once upon a time, people had wild religious experiences. But now we inhabit the iron cage of modernity, and all of those are off the table. That just doesn't describe reality. Mystical experience, religious experience. It's not just the impulse. I think secular liberals are very comfortable saying oh, well, there's always a religious impulse, but it's more than that. It's that people have encounters with God, whatever God may be, some kind of higher reality that enters them and transforms them and gives them visions and gives them intense experiences. Or maybe they have them on the verge of death and come back to tell about them. This is just a feature of human life. It's a very profound and important feature of human life. Maybe it can be explained in non-religious terms. Maybe there's some reductive explanation, but there isn't a good one on offer right now. And so the persistence of that means that religion always regenerates itself, because even under conditions where almost nobody is committed to a particular church or Creed, people are going to go on having dramatic encounters. Like someone like Barbara Ehrenreich, whose famous I had her on for this book. Famous left liberal writer, wrote a whole book called famous atheist. Yes famous atheist called Living with a wild God. And it was just a book about a very secular person who had a lot of religious experiences, experiences that if you went and read William James or read like a medieval Catholic mystic or something, would be totally familiar, and she didn't have a framework, a conceptual framework to fully process them and wrote a great book, really interesting book about you tell the story that you tell in your book. I don't remember the man's name, but he's the editor of skeptics magazine or something like that. So this is Michael Shermer, who is one the more famous professional, skeptical debunkers of religious claims, supernatural things. And so on. And he in one of his books. But he's told this story several times 2 is great credit. He was getting married and his wife had. I'm going to butcher this slightly, but had a great uncle who had been very close to her and was the kind of person who would have given her away at the wedding, but had passed away. So she was feeling lonely and isolated, and they had a radio that had come from him and the radio was broken. Didn't work, had never worked. Schirmer had tried to fix it. It didn't. It just didn't work. It was broken. And at the end of the wedding, during the reception, they heard music from the back of the house and went back into a back room. And there was the radio playing a love song. And I think transitioned from that to some kind of classical music for the later in the evening and then shut off and never worked again. And this experience affected Shermer. And again, to his credit. It was like evidence. Evidence against interest. And I think, again, you have to trust, as always with these stories, right. You have to trust his general reliability and so on, that it wasn't just that there was a battery that was jiggled or something like the radio really didn't work. And really never worked again. There really was no obvious material way that this could have happened. Shermer, in the end, works out. He wants to have a theory of the multiverse where in some different timeline, much like in the movie Interstellar, his wife's great uncle is capable of accessing our timeline. And to Shermer, this is an escape from supernatural explanations. But one reason to just tell that story is that as I think because I was joking about your show being the epitome of secularization, the apogee, whatever. People have experiences like this all the time. This is why I'm not a materialist. This is a very commonplace kind of experience. Not super commonplace. You're not going to have one tomorrow. Probably but this stuff just is part of the warp and woof of reality. And so to finally, long winded answer your original question, I think what happens in conditions when you have weak institutional religions and a secular expert class that is not, militantly atheistic, but says officially these things don't happen, is that people feel like they can't really go all the way up to the creator God, Yahweh, Jehovah, outside of time and space. And they start looking for intermediate powers to become a kind of locus for their own spiritual impulses, stuff with psychedelics, stuff with literal paganism, including stuff on the right. And then the interesting zone, in a way, which is the place where science fiction ideas or science scientific ideas meet a kind of slightly supernaturalist sense of the machine God as this power that into which we are going to commend, commend ourselves. But yeah. And I think that tendency again, this is what Christians would say. But that tendency is bad. It's not that secondary spiritual powers don't exist in the universe. There are in fact, angels and demons and things like that. Saints and powers that other powers, perhaps more mysterious still, but not all of those powers have human good in mind, and it's better to approach them through one of the big old traditional religions that tries to subject them to a kind of higher ordering and says, let me hold you there, because we'll get to this. I want to distinguish two arguments that the book could make and that you take one path in particular. So I am somebody who believes deeply in mystery. I am that kind of agnostic where I'm Californian. I'm a Californian. Exactly Yeah. And this first half of the book or first 1/3 of the book is about this. It's an argument that you, I would call it an argument that you should believe that a kind of New atheist materialism is incompatible with any kind of reasonable understanding of the world and its complexity and its unruliness in the experiences people have in the things that it now increasingly requires you to believe. Like either human consciousness is somehow having some profound effect on quantum physics or if you're going to take a much more straightforward view of the math, we're splitting into cannibal. New realities at all times. The implications are getting weirder and weirder. So many podcasts, so many podcasts. I love all that stuff. But so there's an argument for belief, and then there's an argument for channeling that belief. And I understand the book to really be about the second argument. I actually think the first argument is pretty straightforward, but it's about channeling this belief into organized religion. So given the strangeness of everything you just described, and then also given that the big organized religions disagree on many things, a point you make on the book, a few. Yeah why go there, right. Why is it not enough to just say, you should believe that this world is not something we understand how to explain, and you should be open to all these things that violate a materialist intuition about it. Why, say, or what's the argument for going into organized religion as the answer for such profound unruliness? Well, a couple of things. So first of all, I don't think that the case for not being a materialist is a case for total unruliness to the contrary, I think part of the case for being a materialist, for not being a materialist, is precisely the order of the universe, right. Like one of the problems that materialism has that you gestured at is accounting for the specific ways in which the universe is ordered, the beauty and precision and symmetry involved, and also, as far as we can tell, the extreme unlikeliness that this particular order would be selected for, unless whoever selected it were interested in, listening to lots of podcasts. No creating planet stars and conscious beings. So you have the religious argument is an argument for overarching structure. And then the ways in which it is weird are not themselves entirely random. Like there are patterns in spiritual experience. Lots of there's no predictability to it overall, but the kinds of experiences that people have a certain kind of consistency. You can track different kinds of spiritual experiences across different cultures. You can track them in near-death experiences. You can track them in terms of studies of what appear to be miraculous healings and so on. And again, there just seems to be a way in which you have this overarching order. You have some mysterious relationship between our consciousness and that overarching order. And then you have a lot of religious experiences that seem like higher forces trying to be in touch with us and have some kind of relationship with us. That's the basic picture of that. Again, most of the big religions offer allowing for all their differences. Buddhism and Christianity have quite some pretty substantial differences. But they each describe a universe that's generally like that. So I want to be careful because when I say I'm a Californian, I'm being jokey about it there often. There are, of course, many Orthodox Jews in California and committed Catholic Christians in California and so on. Absolutely so, but I am very familiar with a kind of California seeker mentality. Yep And I think the answer from that perspective to what you just said is Yes, there are patterns. Yes, there are buckets. There is a consistency or a couple maybe consistencies to near death experiences or to memories that young kids have of what at least some people take to be past lives or things like the radio turning on or. But none of these really fit all, at least not all of them into any of the big religions. They don't. I've read enough of the religions to say that what I describe as the unruliness when I say that, I mean enough things that don't fit a kind of simplified view of reality that it would make me wonder about materialism. But also I don't think Judaism explains them all. I don't think that Catholicism explains them all. I'm not saying I know what does. Hinduism well, Hinduism is big enough. It's quite big actually. Maybe it explains more. Could I'm not saying that I know what does. What I'm saying is that I'm very sympathetic to how it can kind of spin you into a profound openness. I know many people who have gone there where what it seems to me now is having come to believe in these kinds of things, it's very hard for them to say where to stop believing. And they now believe a lot of things that are maybe contradictory or there are gurus who are all saying different things, but once you open yourself, it can become hard to close back down. But for them, some of them grew up in a faith tradition. For them, faith tradition didn't explain too much of what they then began to see or experience or come to believe in. I don't think any of the traditions have a really good explanation for why we have of weirdly consistent alien abduction experiences, which I don't believe to be alien abductions, but I'm not sure what to make of them. How do you answer. What is your response to someone like that. Yeah, I mean, I think that there is a balance that you have to strike in looking for a particular religious tradition, right, as opposed to just being a kind of open ended seeker. And you, do you want, I think, a religious tradition that has a set of core values that make sense of a lot of what you've described and also a certain degree of flexibility and uncertainty about some of the things that don't fit into exactly, exactly. It's world. It's world picture. But yeah, the wide the wide array of religious experiences. I think just the data on its own should would make you a kind of like the term I use in the book is perennialist. This is the theory that all the great religions encode some of the truth about reality. You kind of can't go wrong with any of them, as long as they're big enough and old enough. But none of them are like the fullness, the fullness of truth. I would say, though, just as a Roman Catholic that Roman Catholicism again, one of the things that I appreciate about it is that it has a certain kind of supernatural capaciousness. Not in terms of all its formal doctrines. It's not like you open up the Catechism of the Catholic Church and they're like, well, here's what we think about aliens. I mean, it's in there, it's on, but the pages are in the Vatican. There is quite a bit about it in the Vatican. Here's what we think about it. There is some stuff about that stuff. But if you look at actual the history of Catholic cultures, the zone, for instance, in terms of the afterlife. Zones like purgatory and limbo and so on have some kind of connection to people's arguments about ghosts and hauntings and that form of the supernatural. Catholic cultures have always been pretty hospitable to ideas about fairies. I don't know how I've ended up on nice New York Times' podcast, talking about the good people. But the idea of trickster, that there are angels and demons and then there are these weird trickster beings. If you ask me to make a case for catholicism's capaciousness, I could make that case. But then the other thing is, and this is I'm curious what you think about this. Is that one of the things I argue in the book. And it's not a provable assertion. But it's the idea that if there is this overall structure in order to the universe, and if there seem to be higher powers interested in talking to human beings, then maybe you should assume that God is not out to trick you, right. The universe is not a trick. It's not actually presenting you with this impossible, open ended question. It's basically, there's a certain number of big religions. They've stood they've stood the test of time. They've had a pretty powerful shaping influence on human history. Why wouldn't you go in for one of them rather than saying, in good Californian style like I just have to remain perfectly open, right. I think that if you can accept that the universe might have been created with us in mind, then you should give deference. So I want to say that I loved the book. I really, really enjoyed it. And this was the point where it helped me clarify where my intuitions maybe go very differently, which is, I think at a fundamental level, I expect that anything that is worked at Mass scale across many different institutional regimes as an organized religion is likely to have conformed so much to politics and institutions as to have strayed from how profoundly radical, whatever kind of spiritual truth might exist is. This is a way in which the gambit I had at the beginning about Trump is, was connected to the meat of this conversation. I found the argument that you should assume that a religion's success over time is going to correlate to some kind of fundamental truth value. I felt you could take that both ways. I felt you could also take it the other way, which is to say that the religions that survive are going to be the ones that are institutionally compatible with many different regimes and often contort themselves into those regimes. And we talked about the Spanish conquest and the Inquisition. I've been reading about the Renaissance recently, ADA Palmer's great book on inventing the Renaissance. And I wouldn't say the popes of that era cover themselves in Glory. I've seen this in I think you could say this about forms of Judaism, about forms of Buddhism, which Buddhism is a much more complicated institutional story than people who have been raised in America on West Coast Spirit Rock. Buddhism, I think, tend to believe there are all these questions where I think that I believe that whatever ultimate truth is out there is going to be extremely inconvenient and strange. And as you said earlier, and something I thought was quite stirring, the sense that every moment might be a moral test, that a religion that took that truly seriously would end up being very incompatible compatible with ruling regimes and would have a lot of trouble from them, which. Of course, at times these religions have, haven't they. I mean, they've often conformed to that as well, right. I guess to see I think you're making actually precisely the case for different ways, both Judaism and Christianity as probably divinely founded, which is to say, these religions have survived and persisted across multiple different kinds of cultures, multiple different kinds of regimes in each era. Exactly as you say, elements of these religions have made compromises, have intertwined themselves in profound ways. You couldn't get more intertwined than medieval Catholicism and medieval feudalism. This is like and and I think if you are a secular historian looking at that intertwinement, you'd say probably whenever feudalism breaks up, Christianity is going to go away to or Judaism. Judaism is a religion of Temple prayer, religion that's centered on the temple and the Holy of Holies and everything else. You look at that as a secular historian, you're like, well, obviously, if some empire will call it the Romans comes along and destroys that, then, Judaism is going to disappear too, right. That's not what happens. Instead, you have these periods of intertwinement that are then shattered in some way. And in each case, one I mean, the first thing to say is that the radicalism that you describe persists in those eras as well. And again, to go back to the point I was making earlier, this is something the religions themselves advertise the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible is a story where the Jews are failing your tests. The tests that you as recliners set. And you're like, well, if this religion was really from God, they probably wouldn't all become idolaters. And they're like, Ezra, here's our Holy book. It's all about how we became idolaters. But guess what then God did something new and people did something new. And the story continued. And I mean, I just think what you're offering, I think you think it's I don't want to impute. I think, yeah, I think you think it's. You think it's AI think you think you're setting God free a bit from what you see as the corruptions of Trump era Christianity or medieval Inquisition era Christianity. And you're like, no, God is bigger than that. Therefore, a religion that is always getting entangled with worldly power, that can't be where God is. But what you end up with is a counsel of despair, where you're like, well, the only religion that would be worthy of God is one that would be exterminated within like 50 years of its founding by the cruel state. That's you're ending up saying that a religion good enough to join could not exist on the Earth. Well, I don't think I'm saying a religion good enough to join could not exist in the Earth. I'm not trying to set God free from anything because I genuinely am not sure. It's not a pose for me. I'm not. I think a couple of times in this think I'm making an argument when I'm actually genuinely confused or if not genuinely confused, genuinely uncertain. I find the uncertainty radical, and I will say within my own belief system, to the extent it counts as a belief system, which I'm not sure it should just. Mystery and uncertainty is both very much at its heart and to me, very comforting. When I was younger, I just had a crippling fear of death. Just really, truly terrible mortality. Anxiety and somehow what eased it for me was eventually coming to the view that I just was never going to know. And I don't know why I found that comforting, and I don't know why that is stuck, but I did, and to some degree it it has. So when I say this, I am actually not saying that I think I have some answer here that you don't, I really don't. Well, I'm actually testing my intuition against yours. I want to hear your answers. You think I'm right and I'm not. I'm not trying to be too aggressive, Ezra. I think that as from reading the book, I think that the intuition that a lot of modern people have about that even if you concede that materialism is too limited, there is just this fundamental unknowability hanging over everything. I think that intuition is mistaken. I think it is correct about certain aspects of religion. I think there are issues in religion and questions in religion that hang over every tradition imperfectly resolved. I'm not here to tell you I've resolved the problem of evil. The problem of evil is a real problem. It's a real issue. Again, I think it's an issue that's there and acknowledged and wrestled with throughout the Old and New Testament. But I don't think you're going to sit down and just reason your way into a solution to that problem. I do think, though, that you can get a little bit further, just even in the example that you cited, I mean, I don't know what your metaphysical perspectives as a kid were, but I certainly agree that I would personally find it more comforting to believe that death is a mystery than to be Richard Dawkins. And believe that death is just the absolute end and never could be anything else. I just think it is, in fact more probable than not that after you die, you will, meet God, whatever God is, and be asked to account for your life. And so on. And that's not always that's not inherently comforting. Yeah you and I have had this conversation once before. It can be quite terrifying, but I think it is. It's quite terrifying. But I think that it is something that is reasonable to believe. That should give you a little bit more than just the sense of mystery. And more than that, I think it is what God himself, in his infinite mystery and power, wants you to believe which is why he has me here talking to you, I said. I've often thought of you in my life. Is heaven sent, Ross No, I mean, it doesn't mean good things about my final destination. I'm just. I'm just an instrument. But I guess the argument I'm just making is, I think one can get just a little bit further than just mystery itself. One argument you make in the book, you give the example, the canonical example of if you believe in a merciful God, how do you explain the child with leukemia. And you basically say that in any reasonable understanding of God, any reasonable understanding of religion, you can't possibly understand the plan. You can't possibly. I mean, we were in a way, talking about this with Donald Trump, that the unfolding of things will always be so far beyond the human mind that the idea that you have poked out a contradiction is a little bit ridiculous. I actually agree with that. But then I think that when it comes to the organized religions, you say a few times that you just have trouble believing a providential God would allow these religions that are wrong, that are wayward to expand and thrive in the way that they have. And I think an intuition that probably people like me have is that it. It is hard to say that some things can be resolved by, well, a God who is good would not allow x to happen. And then some things have to be resolved with you can't possibly understand why God is allowing x to happen or to happen. And so questioning it or being unwilling to take this on faith is unreasonable. Yeah I don't think you should take on faith that the major world religions are providential. And I think you could imagine yourself in a world where if you lived, if you lived in a world where the dominant set of religions all practiced human sacrifice. And I mean, you can imagine that kind of situation. I think the case for taking the big religions seriously, therefore, you've pushed me on this effectively. Yeah can't just rest on their size and scale alone. You do also have to think that in the aggregate they've had what you as someone who has particular moral intuitions given by God, one hopes at some level have had a positive impact on the world and shaped it in positive ways and and also that they have. And this is also important to my argument that they do have real overlaps. And I think that they do. I think the major world religions, if you look at them just and analyze, the ethical perspective of the major world religions, you do see a certain kind of overlap. So yeah, I think it is not enough to say these things are big and present, and you have to take it on faith that they're part of that. They're where God wants you to be. You do also have to actually look at them and pass some kind of judgment on them. Yes, as I so often do, I want to go back to fairies, please. One of the other arguments you make is that the I should call them the good. You don't want to attract too much of their attention. So why don't you call them the good people. The good people. Which actually, I will admit I am unfamiliar here and did not know that. So you've come here. Forgive me. You've come here to learn. Well, actually, this is exactly what I'm about to say. What just happened. Which, depending on whether or not you believe in the good people, I guess, which is that one of your other arguments is that if you come to the view that the world has supernatural or extrahuman forces, intelligences, agents, et cetera, If you are a seeker of that one thing the major religions have, which is, I think it's fair to say, has been largely downplayed in a lot of modern society is actually a belief about those dangers and arguably experience with those questions, including maybe what to call and not call the good people. And that one of your arguments here is that there is more spiritual danger once you accept some of these premises than people often give credit to that. It's not just about belief or unbelief, it's about the possibility of falling into the wrong beliefs, of listening to the wrong voices, of following the tricksters, of following more demonic forces. And one thing you appreciate about Catholicism is a little bit more openness to that world of forces. I just found that interesting. I always find your kind of openness to the occult to be, I don't want openness to the occult is not what I want. That's not how you want to talk about it. Well, I mean, the reality is that in the book as I have an entire chapter on supernatural experience and weirdness. And I actually debated with myself how much to write about things that are explicitly demonic. Catholicism obviously has its special focus on this through the Office of The Exorcist. There's lots of literature on the demonic and demonic possession, and I ended up feeling quite uncomfortable writing about it too much. And so there's a couple paragraphs and some footnotes, and people who are interested in it can follow that material. But there is a kind of Yeah, there's a kind of balance that you want to strike as just an observer or a writer between of acknowledging those kind of weirder and darker and more disturbing realities, but not like focusing too much attention on them. And maybe my joke. Or is it about saying the good people. It's We both are not joking. Part of that. Part of that. Hey, now, part of that perspective. But I mean, this is. Yeah, this is there are one thing I'm absolutely certain about is that if there is a realm of supernatural experience that is real, that is not just your brain chemistry. You can access it, maybe through altering your brain chemistry and taking ayahuasca and whatever. But if that reality is real, it is 100 percent dangerous dangerous. Dangerous and especially why. 100 percent well, not hundreds. I don't mean like it's. I don't mean every aspect of it is dangerous, but I mean, it is certainly dangerous. There are dangers. There are. There are serious dangers within it. Tell me about your views on psychedelics. I might not. So I have never taken psychedelics. I've never been at an ayahuasca retreat. This is entirely based on readings and conversations. My view is that some psychedelics almost certainly open you to contact with non-human spiritual entities, and that they do so in a way that is different from other forms of spiritual experience, in that it's like, again, not in every case, but it can be a shortcut. But that shortcut means that you're entering these landscapes without the kind of preparation that not only the traditional religions, but the shamans who use ayahuasca in the Amazon or wherever they use it would say is necessary for these kind of encounters. And there's a Twitter joke or a social media joke about getting one shotted by a six dimensional Mesoamerican demon or something. Something like that people make about these kind of drugs. And that's a joke. But I don't think it's entirely a joke. And so I think that Yeah, I think that possibility is real. And it does not at the same time mean that lots of people can't take these drugs and have mystical experiences that just convince them that there's more to reality than just the material, and that is a correct view. So in that sense, the drugs teach you something real about the world, but it can be like anything in human life. And one of the points I try and stress is that religion is not like out there in some compartment where it's totally different from every other thing. And you can't argue about it the way you argue about other things. And so on. In other aspects of human life, dealing with the supernatural is like dealing with the natural. There are good things and bad things and dangers and opportunities, and you just want to be aware of that before you throw yourself into a realm of experience that you might not be prepared for. But I haven't done it. And you have. Or have you say, what have you. Have you Yes So you have immediate, immediate information that I may not have, but one could argue that doing those kind of drugs and coming back from it, not with a sense that you've been possessed by a Mesoamerican demon, but coming back with a sense that man, there's more to the universe than I thought, but I can never possibly figure out the truth. Also, could be a deception that has been imposed upon you. It could be all kinds of things. I will say, without going into any detail, that I had once an incredibly profound and mystical experience. That was, to my genuine shock, completely Jewish in nature and not from a side of Judaism. That is a side that I had been brought up in and that I have never been able to shake. And that has made me much more open to my own tradition than I would have thought. And it actually. Can you give me a bit more. No O.K. That's fair. But what I will say about it is that. O.K O.K. Wait wait wait. I've done a lot. I've done I've done a lot of these conversations. And this is not the first time when someone in a conversation who is officially a mysterian, as you are, has said oh, but by the way, I did have that one experience where it did sound like God was talking to me. I've had a few conversations like that. And so what I want to frightening than that. O.K, well, even better, I'll give you a little bit, so I'll give you a little bit. I wonder how happy our editors are going to be about this conversation. Oh, I think they're happy. It felt for a very punctuated period of time a veil had been ripped open, and you could feel how terrifying these forces really were. This is not the part where I'm a mysterian. This is the part where some things are very hard to know where to put and I've been trying to figure out what to do within my own tradition. I'm in terms of what I am seeking, I'm actually seeking something closer to home, not something completely open. But it has to also feel real to me. I need to feel some gnosis from it as it is put in the book. But do you have to. Well, I feel I do like it, but. But why. I guess why isn't why isn't that so Again, without over describing your own experience to you. Like, why isn't that enough to say, O.K, the God of my fathers in some way gave me a glimpse of what's why we're Jews and not mysterians. And I'm just going to I'm just going to go to my I mean, you need to pick a politically appropriate synagogue and so on. And there are all kinds of issues with that. But I'm just going to go I'm going to go to synagogue, even if I don't feel gnosis, I mean, I don't feel gnosis from Sunday mass with my oversupply of children, right. I mean, occasionally maybe you seem more comfortable with that than I am. Yeah a lot. Well, this is an interesting psychological thing that I've found in these discussions. I think part of it is having been around other people who had spiritual experiences, and observed them and therefore accepted that O.K, some people have profound experiences. I don't. Maybe I would if I took ayahuasca, but it's O.K for me to be a person who isn't getting gnosis all the time, but is like, I feel good at Mass. Not always, but most of the time. But it just seems to me that, when you're called before the throne of the most high and the cherubim and Seraphim are there, and you're like, well, I wanted some gnosis. And God is like, I gave you gnosis. I gave you the big dose. Here's, here's I think, where the question of organized religion becomes then complicated. As I said, it comes from a part of Judaism that is not the one I grew up in or even really know how to find out there. It's definitely there. I can find it. I can talk to people in Judaism about it, but it's strange. And the reason it felt. You mean you mean the mystical part. Yes it's much more mystical part of Judaism. Hold on. Let me. Let me finish my thing. Yeah sorry. And in part because I had so little experience with that, had to actually find the structure for what it was later, that it didn't feel like something my own mind had just invented. Whoa Part of the sealing tape just fell down in front of Ross. You can take your signs where you get them. There you go. This will be better on video. This particular episode. Yep so. And then you go to sorry things happen. Then you go to your space that's more organized. And what you're seeing doesn't track that at all. Yeah no that's fair. And honestly we had I mean, as a kid, we had experiences like that in my own family where my parents, especially my mother, we were Episcopalian, which is a very anti mystical part of Christianity overall. And my mother had these intense experiences in a context of charismatic healing services. And then we wanted a church to go to. And it was hard to find, starting in mainline Protestantism, a church where it seemed like the thing that she had encountered was also there in some way. And I think in the end, we went through a lot of places and ended up as Catholics, in part because I do think Catholicism does a good job of saying, look, expecting the Holy Spirit to descend constantly all the time. It's a ritual religion, and the sacraments work, whether or not you're feeling a blast of God's presence. But it is a reasonable desire to feel like the encounter you have has some relationship to what is being done on the altar or done in the rituals. I think that's completely understandable. Let me ask you a broader question about psychedelics because the story I just offered a little bit unwittingly is I don't want to say it's common, but I've read many like it from many traditions. One perception of these drugs or medicines, or whatever you want to call them, is that they're pretty profound spiritual technologies. If you believe in them from that perspective, as opposed to believe they're just inducing some random firings of chemicals. So you might imagine this is something that in a world that got disenchanted, you would want these big traditions to try to take on, to try to build some containers of safety and knowledge around them. But they seem like a thing that can pretty reliably create an experience that actually connects people in a very profound way to their home tradition. Now, I can do other things too, but as you say, that's true for a lot of things in religion. Why should they not be used as that. Why treat them as a cult as opposed to perhaps a somewhat providential thing that emerged at this time when people badly need the help of things that create a kind of re-enchantment and breaks the shell of logic that makes for many faiths so difficult. Now, I think that's a fair question, and I think one answer is that they like all things that operate in reality from a Christian perspective. They must have some providential expression. The Catholic, the Catholic view basically, is that you're not supposed to try and commune with spirits, speak to the dead in certain ways you shouldn't go to a séance. Like there's a certain set of things that Catholics, a certain set of supernatural experiences that Catholics are not supposed to seek out. And there's some biblical warrant for this. And there's the explicit teaching, teaching of the church. And the simplest way to express why that is, maybe is to say that the church thinks there's a certain set of things that we know God is present in, and then there's a certain set of things that are just like opening doors. And God and his Providence can certainly be there when you open the door. But we don't have any kind of guarantee of that. And by opening the door, you are opening yourself in a way that is fundamentally unsafe. Now, again, does that mean that someone can't come to God by taking a psychedelic? No, absolutely. Someone can under my under this theory. But for the church itself or for Christians in general, there is a sense, I think that well, once you are, once you are in, then you aren't supposed to go looking in those places anymore because we just don't know what the potential dangers are there. Here's the other skeptic interpretation of what I just said. The very fact that you can reliably induce mystical experience. It just shows that this is just random firings of brain chemicals, that this should make you much more skeptical all the way through that mystical experience has any truth value to it at all. The fact that something that in the case of LSD, a Swedish chemist synthesized just mere decades ago can be some reliable portal to people feeling like they had some kind of mystic experience. It actually implies that none of this was ever mystic at all, that there's some kind of pattern of brain chemicals that you can fire off, that in the same way. Some patterns will make you depressed, and other patterns will make you think your body is itching and other things will do. There's just one of those patterns creates the misapprehension of the numinous, and that all this is actually not an argument for any kind of belief. None of it is a spiritual technology. What it shows you is that there's kind of nothing here, and it actually just explains away a huge category of experience that leads people towards these fantastical claims. And to be clear, I don't think that one should ever rest the case for the existence of God or the supernatural on psychedelic experiences alone, anything like that, but near-death experiences in the book. There's fasting. There's a lot of induced mystical experience or mystical experience in moments of extremists. And you do take it seriously. So I guess I'm asking, why not just the brain chemicals. I think what one should take seriously is the fact that clearly, our minds exist in a dynamic relationship to our bodies and to physical reality and religious experience. There are kinds of again, to take the Barbara Ehrenreich example, there is the kind of religious experience that falls on people unbidden in some way. And I have seen this happen. And I think it's a little bit hard to tell a brain chemistry story where it's like, why. Why do human beings like, suddenly have this God apprehension thing that just turns on. Where did this apprehension device come from. All our other apprehension devices are evolved to meet some actual reality. Well, can I force you to Steelman this. Because, I mean, if you've ever read an Oliver Sacks book or familiar. I mean, as you are, I with mental illnesses, there are many things that happen in our brains where you might say, why do we have something like that can ever turn on. But we do. Yes, but religious experience and spiritual experience are at the very least in a distinct category from mental illness. People who have religious experiences are very often entirely sane and entirely aware of the strangeness of the experience they've had, and so on. Again, which doesn't. I take your point about the sacks. The Oliver Sacks stuff, right. Could just say, O.K, well, people's brains can misfire in this way. And it yields mental illness. And they misfire in that way. And they think they're encountering they're encountering the numinous or something like that. I don't think that's an impossible view to hold. All I'm saying is that the religious world picture already takes it for granted that your body, the physicality of your body, has some kind of connection to your apprehension of the divine. And most of the time you are not supposed to be apprehending the divine. And this goes to go back to your vision. The idea that religion is a scaffolding, O.K. Like reality itself is kind of like the Silicon Valley guys that say it's a simulation, right. O.K well, it's a world that you're supposed to be in. You're supposed to be in this world. Whatever God is up to doesn't work. If we're not in this world most of the time, and having a spiritual experience is getting our mind a little bit out of this material world. But it's not the way things are supposed to work all the time. We're here as material, embodied creatures for a reason. But Yeah, I don't think there's anything internally contradictory about thinking that the clear link between the physical and the spiritual means that you could reduce the spiritual to the physical experience. I always enjoy that there are these two completely opposite theories of what the brain is doing, and I'm not saying one is it much more accepted than the other, but there's the understanding, the more materialistic sense of it that everything in our experience is the brain. Yes And then there's the theory that I have heard from some consciousness researchers that exist in the near-death experience world that some of the psychedelics people believe that the brain is kind of like a reducing valve Yes Tell me about that thought. Yeah That's just the idea that whatever the mind or soul or consciousness is capable of this much wider apprehension of reality, including divine realities, whatever those may be, that aren't really fully compatible with, being an embodied creature in the world. And so to be an embodied creature in the world, you need to be your mind's capacities and experiences need to be reduced, funneled down to the sensory inputs being processed by your eyes and nose and mouth and ears. And so that's why when you have moments when you shake up the brain through, when you put the brain in extreme circumstances via fasting or these kind of things, or when you reach the threshold of death, the mind's experience doesn't actually seem to contract, it seems to expand. And one of the challenges in explaining something like near-death experiences from the materialist perspective, is that they are described not as fragmentary hallucinations, dreamlike experiences, random, chaotic. They are described as more real than real, incredibly intense. They carry back into people's post near-death experience lives. They cause big changes to people's near-death experience lives, and it really is a little bit hard to tell an evolutionary just-so story about why the brain is wired, for some Darwinian reason, to generate its most intense experiences at a time when, for most people, you're just going to die. You talk in the book about something you call official knowledge. What's official knowledge. Official knowledge is the knowledge about the world that is considered normal and respectable in publications like the New York Times' Ivy League universities, most Wikipedia entries. The The thing I find very strange things on Wikipedia. You can but to their credit, in a certain way, the editors of Wikipedia try to impose some of the same assumptions about the world that are shared by most of the formal institutions of knowledge creation out there. One of the things that has happened to you over the years, you've written very beautifully about is you've had kind of profound struggles with chronic Lyme. And it. It made you more open to the way a lot of people feel failed by official knowledge and the institutions that produce it. And I've been interested in how that experience, which I think is based in some ways through the book. The generalizability of it for you. Like what happens when all of a sudden what is official knowledge no longer conforms to the world as you experience it. And the crowbar of skepticism that places between not just and that particular institution, but maybe you and all of them simultaneously, if this could be wrong, if this could have failed me so profoundly. Well, who's to say it's not all failing me so profoundly? Yes no, I mean, that is the feeling that you have. And so I had still have to some degree, but I'm much better. A chronic illness that is not officially recognized by the Centers for Disease Control. And indeed, to say that you have the chronic form of Lyme disease is to identify yourself in some way with just the world of everyone from RFK jr. to holistic wellness practitioners and so on a whole world that is held in severe disrepute. Disrepute by official knowledge. Official medical knowledge, you say Kind of pointing at me pointing no, no, no, I mean, I think at this conversation has been the most serious blow to official knowledge since. No, I don't know. And so that obviously like I really was sick, I really did get better using a combination of really strong antibiotics and other Stranger Things that are not recommended by the CDC. But it really did work. And I am morally certain both that chronic Lyme disease absolutely exists and the CDC'S recommendations are absolutely wrong. So then the challenge is you've seen that the pillar of official truth has a hole in it. How many holes does that mean that there are. And something that I have very self-consciously tried to do in my own thinking about this, and this applies to arguments about religion and religious belief as well, is to not assume that because official knowledge is wrong about one thing, it's wrong about everything. That seems like a big mistake. And two, not to assume that because official knowledge is wrong about one thing, one important thing that really affected my life, that all evidentiary standards should be thrown out or anything like that. But that's clearly a really hard psychological balance to strike. I think you just see this. I saw it myself. I spent a lot of time in worlds of chronic illness and alternative medicine, and people, just for totally understandable reasons, became full spectrum skeptics about anything the government said. Anything that American Medical Association said it was just if they're wrong about the money illness and my experience, they must be wrong about everything. The pull of that is incredibly strong. And in the case of religion, right. I think one of the things understandably, that nice secular agnostic people fear about going too far with my arguments, is that the next thing we're going to be throwing out all of modern science and progress and locking up Galileo and so on, all of these things. And, I don't want to say that that's not a legitimate fear. There clearly are ways in which religious belief and religious doctrine can end up being an impediment to finding out what is true about the world. I'm interested in what is true about the world. In the end, that is my goal is. And your goal. Hopefully All of our goal as journalists is to figure out what is true about the world. And I think to my mind very clearly, certain things are true about the world that have to do with God, and the possibility of the supernatural that are not encompassed by current official knowledge. And I think the modern liberal project is correct, that there are just limits to the kind of certainty you can have and how that certainty should cash out, certainly in politics. So there is a balance. And Yeah, any time you're trying to correct an official consensus, you are looking for a balance where the correction doesn't become an overcorrection. When we were young bloggers so many years ago, so many, many years ago, Yes, it felt then the political system seemed deeply polarized on taxes, on foreign policy, on the Affordable Care Act. And I'm not saying those polarizations don't still exist. They do. But we seem more fundamentally polarized now on official knowledge than on anything else. And the parts of the Democratic Party that were outside that consensus, led by a figure like RFK jr. Have become parts of the Republican Party, the parts of the Republican Party that were more inside that consensus and want to stay there. Some of them Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and Mitt Romney, have moved away from at least the Trump Republican Party. And so the coalitions, which used to have a mix of people inside and outside official consensus, now are split between them. And, this feels to me like one of the things that is really deranged, our politics, that the parties are of like imbalanced in terms of their relationship to institutions. Democrats may be too trusting Republicans much, much, much, in my view, too skeptical with too little empirical and grounding anymore. I guess I was curious before you said, Yep, a bunch of times. If you agreed with that way of no, no, I absolutely do. Although, yeah, I mean, I would on your last point. Yes You would. Well, I would push harder on I think one reason that Donald Trump is President, again, is precisely that the party of official knowledge seem to do a lot of really crazy things, and that made people more sympathetic to the party of outsider knowledge. But look now, the party of but look now, the party of outsider knowledge is in power. But let me add to that story just in one way, which I think the polarization had already happened, and that's actually part of what that period represented. One of the things Democrats didn't have during that period was actually enough skepticism of the institutions of official knowledge. I think you would agree that the people pushing a lot of the ideas that you see as destructive from them, and some of them I probably also feel were ultimately destructive, were doing so wrapped in the garb of official knowledge, wrapped in credentials, coming out of universities, et cetera, that it was in part actually an institutional monoculture on the Democratic side that created a loss of some antibodies that might have created some friction between that and going way too far. Yes And then, now you have the other side in power also without any antibodies. Yes And I think one of my disappointments is about the Trump administration in the first three months is just how pure and uncut. Its outsider ISM seems to be right. And I think it was an open question when Trump was reelected would RFK jr. Be running HHS or would he be running the President's Council on making America healthy again. And we got the timeline where he's running HHS. And you could multiply apply examples. And I think in many of those examples, you can see a version of the problem that I identified to you just now, right. Which is that you can see it in the trade and tariffs debate, this assumption that the experts got something big wrong and therefore Peter Navarro should make trade policy. And the second does not follow from the first. And the huge challenge for conservatism right now is to figure out how you generate some kind of stability of actual expertise in a party that is now temperamentally, completely anti-establishment, populist and so on. And I think there was a hope that the Silicon Valley faction that migrated into the Republican camp, in part in reaction to some of the failures of expertise that you just acknowledged would play a version, a version of that role. And I think definitely Elon Musk has not played a version of that role to date. So you're the Republican Party is a party in search of a kind of stable system of official knowledge generation, besides whatever Donald Trump decides. And it doesn't have one at the moment, I think for the foreseeable future. Always our final question. What are three books you would recommend to the audience. So I'm going to give three books on religion that connect to my attempt to shift what official knowledge or the official knowledge of New York Times' podcasters podcast listeners think about religion. The first one is a book from about 20 years ago by a physicist named Stephen Barr, called 'Modern Physics and Ancient Faith' That is, I think, despite being a little bit dated, is still really the best overall survey of where arguments in modern physics that relate to religion stand and how a reasonable person might think about it. It's not a dogmatic book. It's a very open minded and interesting book. So that's book one. Since we were talking about near-death experiences, there's a million books about near-death experiences, many of them bad. I think people who are interested in this subject interested in the conversation. One one recommendation would be a book called 'After' by Bruce Greyson, who is, I think, psychiatrist or neurologist neuroscientist from the University of Virginia who just has a good overview, I would say, from a perspective of a practicing physician, of why people take these strange stories seriously and why it might unsettle a materialist worldview. And the third book, I mean, honestly, Ezra, since you've maybe this is unnecessary since you conceded so much ground to the mysterians, but I think a final book that's useful to people who listen to this show and are like, what are these two guys smoking. Talking about consciousness. Like, this is a book that was very controversial in the philosophical community when it came out. But a book by called 'Mind and Cosmos' by Thomas Nagel, who's a famous philosopher, not religious, but arguing for the fundamental limits and problems with a materialist framework on the world. And it is a very short book, which is why I don't hesitate to recommend it. A lot of books about consciousness are not short, but this one I think you can read and get a sense of why intelligent people might at least be inclined towards an style mysterianism, if not quite towards the militant Catholicism of Ross Douthat. Ross I enjoyed it a ton. Thank you very much. I enjoyed it as well. Ezra Thank you so much.
This is an edited transcript of an episode of 'The Ezra Klein Show.' You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
I always enjoy conversations that I have no earthly idea how to describe, and today's is very much in that vein.
My guest is my Times Opinion colleague Ross Douthat. He's the author of 'Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious,' a book I enjoyed very much, even though I had some questions about quite a bit of it. And he's the host of the new and really excellent New York Times Opinion podcast 'Interesting Times,' where he has been interviewing people on the modern American right.
This is a conversation about mysticism and the role it is playing in the Trump administration and this era in politics. It's also about belief and the role it plays in society and in our lives — Ross's argument for why we should all be more religious. And the conversation also gets into some things I did not expect to be talking about today on the show.
A note before we get into the conversation: This was recorded on Monday, April 14, the day of the Trump-Bukele meeting and a week before the death of Pope Francis. So even though both topics would have fit into parts of this conversation, we did not talk about either. But, as you'll hear, the conversation stands on its own.
Ezra Klein: Ross Douthat, welcome to the show.
Ross Douthat: Ezra Klein, it is a pleasure to be here.
Last year, after the first assassination attempt on Donald Trump, you wrote about Trump as aman of destiny — that he was 'a figure touched by the gods of fortune in a way that transcends the normal rules of politics.'
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
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Yahoo
21 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Crypto exchanges rushed to list Trump's coin - leaving many losers and some big winners
By Hannah Lang, Elizabeth Howcroft, Michelle Conlin and Medha Singh NEW YORK (Reuters) -Crypto exchange Coinbase assures users on its website that it puts any new digital coin through "rigorous" vetting before allowing it to trade. It's an at-times lengthy process meant to protect customers by examining the people connected to the project and the risk of market manipulation or other scams. With President Donald Trump's crypto token, $TRUMP, Coinbase made up its mind in just one day. The $TRUMP token, which launched three days before his inauguration in January, is a meme coin. Based on cultural fads or celebrities, these coins have no intrinsic value and – past experience has shown – are prone to large price swings that can leave investors with losses. A Reuters analysis of crypto market data and industry announcements found that, compared to other recent large meme coins, the biggest crypto exchanges took Trump's to market with unusual speed, despite stating they vet risky coins thoroughly to protect small investors. Some also approved the listing in spite of the high share of coins concentrated in the hands of Trump and his partners, which would normally represent a red flag because of the risk that dumping of tokens by insiders could collapse the price and hurt other investors, some executives said. After reaching an all-time high of $75.35 on April 19, just two days after its launch, $TRUMP crashed to the $7 range by early April, leaving many holders nursing losses. It was trading around $9.55 Thursday. "When the president of the United States launches a meme coin, I thought I might as well put some money inside," said Carl 'Moon' Runefelt, a Dubai-based crypto investor who runs a bitcoin trading channel on YouTube called the "Moon Show." Runefelt said he bought $300,000 worth of the meme coin in tranches at between $50 and $60: "It's probably one of my worst trades, unfortunately." The Reuters analysis showed that eight of the 10 largest crypto exchanges by market share listed the coin within 48 hours of its release. The ninth, Coinbase, added $TRUMP to its listings roadmap on January 18 – indicating it had decided to accept it - and listed the coin three days later. The tenth, Upbit, listed $TRUMP on February 13. That was much faster than they've done on average with the biggest meme coins. Reuters examined how long it took the same 10 exchanges - Binance, Bitget, MEXC, OKX, Coinbase, Bybit, Upbit, and HTX - to list the four other largest meme coins launched since 2022. These, measured by market cap on May 29, are Pepe, Bonk, Fartcoin and dogwifhat. All 10 exchanges listed Pepe and Bonk. Nine listed dogwifhat, and seven listed Fartcoin. On average, the 10 exchanges took 129 days to list those coins. For $TRUMP, they took an average of four. Asked for comment about why they listed $TRUMP so quickly, Bitget, MEXC, OKX, Coinbase and Upbit all said they had not cut any corners with their vetting process. The other five exchanges did not respond to Reuters' questions. Three – Bitget, Coinbase, MEXC – said they moved fast to respond to overwhelming demand for the $TRUMP coin. "The crypto space was buzzing with the hype and, as any other token with a growing craze, it was imperative to add TRUMP," Gracy Chen, Bitget's CEO, said in a statement. Chen said the fact that Trump himself announced the coin on his social media accounts "should kind of solve the compliance issue," citing the fact that "he's the president of the United States." 'NO CONFLICTS OF INTEREST' Reuters found no suggestion that Trump or anyone related to his businesses exerted pressure on the exchanges. In response to a request for comment, a White House press official told Reuters the president's assets had been placed in a family trust: "There are no conflicts of interest because the president isn't managing the assets. Any insinuation that there is a conflict of interest is irresponsible." The official referred specific questions about the meme coin to the Trump Organization, which did not respond to Reuters. Coinbase said the $TRUMP token got no special exceptions and the exchange followed its normal process when listing the coin. Paul Grewal, Coinbase's chief legal officer, said many people had to work over the weekend to get the listing done quickly, but no steps were skipped. "Given the information that was shared publicly, we were confident that users could engage with the token positively and safely," Grewal told Reuters. Coinbase listed $TRUMP as an "experimental" token to indicate it comes with "certain risks, including price swings," according to the company's website. The vetting of coins often focuses on how well-known the issuer is, how likely they are to remain in the public eye and how much they engage with the online community to sustain interest in the coin, metrics that $TRUMP would score highly on, according to Santa Clara University finance professor Seoyoung Kim, who specializes in crypto analytics. She cautioned that focusing on vetting speed alone could provide an incomplete picture of investor protection. A more holistic analysis, Kim said, would also involve factors such as the average market cap at which a coin is listed, for how long it has sustained that level before its listing, and its daily trading volumes. With $TRUMP listed so soon after launch, there was little such data for exchanges to parse. $TRUMP's market cap has since fallen to around $1.9 billion, down sharply from its peak above $15 billion on January 19. But that still ranks it amongst the largest meme coins launched since 2022. Reuters ran its listing-speed analysis past five academics with crypto expertise, including Kim, who all said its methodology was sound. David Krause, Emeritus Professor of Finance at Marquette University, who has studied Trump's crypto ventures, said the quickness of the $TRUMP listing "suggests either a dramatic acceleration of due diligence or corners being cut." "Either scenario has significant implications for investor protection and market integrity," he said. YOU DON'T SAY NO TO THE PRESIDENT The president's rush of business ventures in a lightly-regulated sector that his government is responsible for overseeing has drawn criticism from Democrats, consumer advocacy groups and former financial enforcement officials. "You don't say no to hosting the president's new meme coin," said Corey Frayer, a former senior crypto advisor at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Frayer is now director of a non-profit advocacy group, the Consumer Federation of America. "The president controls who oversees your business and how they enforce the law." Under former President Joe Biden, the SEC maintained that most crypto tokens, including meme coins, should be regulated as securities, making exchanges cautious about listing them. That began to change, quickly, after Trump was elected last November. The Republican has styled himself as the "crypto president," pledging to overhaul regulation of the sector. Following Trump's election, Coinbase – the largest publicly traded crypto exchange in the United States – and several of its rivals began listing more meme coins. In Trump's second term, the SEC has paused or withdrawn high-profile enforcement actions against crypto operators, including a major investor in a Trump family crypto project, and issued a staff statement concluding that meme coins do not constitute securities. An SEC spokesperson declined to comment on the agency's crypto policy and Trump's coin. Trump's family has launched multiple crypto ventures, raking in hundreds of millions of dollars. The $TRUMP token quickly earned an estimated $320 million in fees, though it's not publicly known how that amount has been divided between a Trump-controlled entity and its partners. OVERLOOKED CONCERNS Exchanges have been major beneficiaries of Trump's embrace of the industry. $TRUMP has generated significant revenue for the 10 exchanges in Reuters' review: more than $172 million in trading fees, according to estimates based on standard fees compiled for the news agency by CoinDesk Data, a crypto industry data provider. Trade in the coin, meanwhile, has favored a small group of investors. At the top, 45 crypto wallets cleared about $1.2 billion in profits overall, while another 712,777 wallets have collectively lost $4.3 billion, according to trading data analyzed by crypto analysis firm Bubblemaps as of June 18. In the middle, more than half a million wallets made an average of $5,656 profit each. In listing $TRUMP, some exchanges proceeded despite a factor they'd previously labelled as a red flag: 80% of the coin's supply was held by the Trump family and its partners. Such a high concentration of ownership can allow the team behind a coin to sell large amounts of it at once, collapsing the price for retail investors. The terms of the $TRUMP coin specified that its total supply would be gradually unlocked over three years after initial release. On January 16, the day before $TRUMP was released, the New York State Department of Financial Services issued an alert to consumers about the risks of meme coins. Such coins, the notice said, are carried by platforms not licensed by the state and the supply of the digital tokens is often controlled by a small number of people. That opens the door to "pump-and-dump schemes," the regulator noted, in which public hype by their issuers leads to a jump in price – with big, early investors exiting and smaller retail buyers left holding the losses that follow. The NYDFS declined to comment beyond the guidance. Coinbase, which is subject to New York regulations, blocked state residents from accessing the token, but allowed U.S. customers elsewhere to trade. To list $TRUMP in New York, the exchange would have faced a long list of risk assessment and governance requirements. Some other exchanges acknowledged they looked past concerns about the concentration in a bid to serve customer demand. MEXC's chief operating officer, Tracy Jin, told Reuters that, because of the concentration of tokens, $TRUMP did not meet its usual standards for a full listing on its main board, but the exchange pushed ahead anyway due to strong demand. In a follow-up written statement, an MEXC spokesperson said that a "faster-than-usual" listing was possible because the coin had clear market momentum and it met "our listing standards early." Commenting on the Reuters listing-speed analysis, the spokesperson said market conditions and demand for political meme tokens had changed since 2022, "making direct comparisons less relevant." Bitget also had concerns about the 80% figure, CEO Chen told Reuters. "Eighty percent held by the team, even though there's a little bit of a lock-up period, is in my opinion very risky," said Chen. "Ultimately, user trading volume, demand … overrode the so-called risky factor here." Like some exchanges, Bitget, based in the Seychelles, does not have a business presence in the U.S. or serve clients who reside there, Chen said. "Globally," she added, "people are generally aware of the risks associated with trading meme coins." Upbit, which operates in South Korea, said it does not comment on specific coin listings but that it has "a rigorous and comprehensive evaluation process." Erald Ghoos, CEO for Europe of OKX, said the exchange's legal and compliance teams stayed up all night over different time zones to work on the listing. Seychelles-registered OKX says its diligence process requires "meticulous preparation." It decided to list $TRUMP within 26 hours. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Atlantic
21 minutes ago
- Atlantic
Flattery, Firmness, and Flourishes
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's April visit to the White House was, by all accounts, a success. She soothed President Donald Trump with dulcet talk of 'Western nationalism,' eased through a potentially awkward moment regarding Ukraine, and invited Trump to visit Rome—extracting a promise that he would come in the 'near future.' Yet despite the apparently seamless choreography, she and her team offered some after-action advice to fellow world leaders hoping for similarly controversy-free exchanges with Trump: Prepare for the unexpected. Specifically, she had been caught off guard when, before a supposedly private lunch in the Cabinet Room, journalists had been escorted in for seven minutes of questions; she found herself awkwardly positioned with her back to the cameras—much of the footage of Meloni captures the silky blond strands atop her head—and she was forced to either ignore the media in order to address Trump directly or twist herself to the left, away from the president, to try to speak with the reporters. Exactly a week later, when Jonas Gahr Støre, the prime minister of Norway, arrived at the White House, he was prepared. His team had watched videos of prior visits with world leaders, and strategized over various scenarios. Having seen Trump seem to bristle when Meloni was asked a question in her native Italian, they encouraged their own press corps to pose their queries exclusively in English. (The Norwegian journalists also seemed to have done their homework; young female reporters positioned themselves near the front, smiling to catch Trump's attention, and got in an early flurry of questions.) 'You have to—to use Trump's words—play the cards you have,' one European diplomat told us anonymously, like nearly every other diplomat or foreign official we spoke with, to avoid angering Trump or revealing their nation's strategies for managing the mercurial U.S. president. Anne Applebaum: The U.S. is switching sides In Trump's second term, foreign leaders now meticulously prepare for their phone calls and meetings with him, often war-gaming possible surprises and entanglements, and trading information and best practices with allies. Eight diplomats and officials from six countries, as well as other foreign-policy experts, all described to us an unofficial formula for ensuring fruitful interactions with Trump: an alchemic mix of flattery, firmness, and personal flourishes. Foreign leaders, especially those from fellow democracies, face an inherent tension in wanting to woo Trump while also advocating for their country's own interests and maintaining their standing back home. 'There is a sense that you want to be on the right side of history. You do want to be able to look at yourself in the mirror and reread your statements in the Oval Office a couple of years later and say, 'I feel good about what I said,'' a second European diplomat told us. This, of course, can prove complicated. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky learned this lesson rather publicly in a now-infamous Oval Office blowup on the last day of February, which got him booted from the White House so quickly that Trump's aides ate the lunch intended for him and his fellow Ukrainians. ('No deal and no meal,' Axios blared at the time.) And in May, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa was meeting with Trump in the Oval when the U.S. president unexpectedly dimmed the lights and began playing a video that he said buttressed his unsupported claim that South Africa's white population is facing a 'genocide.' 'The leaders of friendly countries are turning keys in the lock desperately trying to find a way to prevent their meetings with President Trump from being disasters,' Kori Schake, the director of defense and foreign-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing writer at The Atlantic, told us. 'The challenge for foreign leaders is that President Trump seems to only have two categories—supplicants and enemies.' But that hasn't stopped visiting officials and diplomats from trying. 'They ask knowledgeable Americans, 'Might this work? This is what we're thinking of trying. Do you think this is good enough?'' Schake told us. Even some of the preparations—walking through the day's expected events in advance of the actual visit—underscore the inherent unpredictability of this administration. 'Our entire walk-through with the White House was like, 'This is what it's going to be like, but we follow the lead of the president,'' the second European diplomat told us, laughing. Trump has long been eager to receive a Nobel Peace Prize—for any conflict, in any region. So it was not entirely surprising when the government of Pakistan nominated Trump for the prize last month for helping resolve tensions between Pakistan and India. Pakistan, after all, was simply following the dependable diplomatic crutch of flattery with Trump, hoping to improve its standing with the U.S. president by offering him the possibility of something he desperately covets. (His subsequent bombing of Iran's nuclear sites created understandable consternation among Pakistanis, but during an Oval Office meeting last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took up the cause, announcing that he had, too, nominated Trump for the Nobel Prize—this time for his work in the Middle East.) The same week that Pakistan put Trump up for the peace prize, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte engaged in some behind-the-scenes blandishments with Trump ahead of a NATO summit in the Netherlands—which became public when Trump posted on Truth Social the entirety of a text message Rutte had sent him. The missive praised Trump for his 'decisive action in Iran,' which Rutte called 'truly extraordinary,' before moving on to laud Trump for pressuring his NATO allies to spend more on defending their countries. 'You are flying into another big success in The Hague this evening,' Rutte wrote. 'Europe is going to pay in a BIG way, as they should, and it will be your win.' During the actual summit, Rutte went on to call Trump 'Daddy' as Trump likened Israel and Iran to fighting schoolchildren. 'Daddy has to sometimes use strong language,' the NATO chief said. Trump and his team were, predictably, delighted. They began selling 'Daddy' merch —an orange T-shirt with DADDY emblazoned just below Trump's notorious mug-shot scowl—and released a video mash-up of Trump at the summit set to Usher's 'Hey Daddy (Daddy's Home).' The light mockery that suffused their glee was not lost on Rutte's peers. Flattery, after all, must be coupled with firmness, several diplomats explained. Not to mention at least a smidgen of dignity. 'Who isn't a bit embarrassed on his behalf?' one diplomat said of Rutte. A fine line, several diplomats told us, separates routine diplomatic supplication from humiliating obsequiousness; Trump at times seems to respect people who stand up to him. A NATO ambassador told us that Rutte's acclamatory message to Trump wasn't widely workshopped in Brussels ahead of time and that the secretary general is trusted to manage his own relationship with the American president. 'The allies wanted an agile operator, and we've gotten that,' the ambassador said, noting that Trump frequently calls Rutte to consult him. The ambassador added that the more conciliatory approach world leaders are taking with Trump partly reflects standard diplomacy—and partly reflects the Republican standard-bearer's staying power. 'If you went through the first term saying, 'This is an aberration; we just have to get through it,' defiance was a reasonable bet to make,' the ambassador told us. 'Now we've seen him be reelected. At least half of Americans are aligned with his politics. It's not just that he's back. Clearly there's been a shift in America more deeply.' Marc Short, who served as Vice President Mike Pence's chief of staff during Trump's first term, told us the flattery approach 'usually works.' He pointed to the strong relationship between Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron dating back to the early days of the Trump administration, when Macron—understanding the American president's love of pomp and circumstance and, frankly, just a damn good parade—invited him to Paris for Bastille Day. The two disagreed on a host of actual policy matters—the 2015 Iran deal and green energy among them—but 'that was one of the closest relationships of European leaders he had,' Short told us, in part because 'Macron was pretty good at those public communications of flattery.' 'It does seem that it's a little more exaggerated in the second go-round,' he told us. 'Maybe it's just the learning curve, but it seems like it's copied more now.' Still, not everyone is sold on the approach. After the White House paused some weapons transfers to Ukraine, Rutte faced fresh criticism for his fawning comments about Trump. Carlo Masala, an authority on the German military and a professor at the Bundeswehr University in Munich, tagged the NATO secretary general on X and asked, in a mélange of English and German, 'Where ist your Daddy now?' Golf trophies. Monarchy merch. Love letters. As foreign leaders and their allies have engaged in gossipy group shares about how to prepare for a meeting with Trump—or, at the very least, for the love of God and all that is just in the world, prevent it from going totally off the rails—nearly every country has come up with its own similar, yet distinctly homegrown, approach. Finnish President Alexander Stubb, who attended Furman University in South Carolina on a golf scholarship, played a round with Trump early in his return to power, much to the envy of fellow world leaders. (Lindsey Graham, South Carolina's senior senator and a reliable Trump sidekick, helped orchestrate the game, though it probably didn't hurt the transatlantic relationship that Stubb, playing on Trump's team at his Florida golf club's spring member-guest tournament, helped the U.S. president win the championship.) 'That's not an option for all the world leaders,' one European official told us, channeling the wistful desire for a links-blessed leader we heard from other diplomats. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who visited the White House in February, found success by bringing a personal letter from King Charles, inviting Trump for a second state visit—and adopting Trump's grandiose language in calling the possibility of a second such ceremony 'truly historic' and twice labeling it 'unprecedented.' (Trump is expected to visit this fall.) Here, the Brits engaged in a one-two titillation of Trump's diplomatic erogenous zones: his love of monarchies, particularly the British royals, and his passion for epistolary communication. In his first term, Trump waxed lyrical about his 'love letters' with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, and more recently, he relished recounting to Congress a letter Zelensky had sent him following their Oval Office spat. By the time Netanyahu announced his Nobel Peace Prize nomination last week, he was sufficiently savvy to present Trump with the letter he said he had sent to the Nobel Prize committee. 'The president respects good manners, and seems to value letters. He appreciates a slight formality,' a British diplomat told us. 'He clearly assigns a lot of value to, 'I have signed this, I have written this, I have touched this.'' (Indeed, Trump favors Sharpie-scrawled missives himself.) But Starmer's gambit also seemed to work because the offer he bore from King Charles was authentic. There still exists a 'special relationship' between the two countries, the working royals are diplomats by another name, and the British are experts at state visits and the accompanying ceremony. 'We will roll out the red carpet,' the British diplomat told us. 'Americans should expect a full royal display of the formal respect we afford our closest ally.' Or perhaps, as another European suggested to us, Washington's transatlantic partners have merely learned to act a bit like the Gulf states, which welcomed Trump with immense fanfare during his visit to the Middle East in May. The United Arab Emirates awarded Trump the Order of Zayed, the country's highest civil decoration. In Doha, Trump's motorcade included two red Tesla Cybertrucks—a nod to Trump's on-again, off-again billionaire best buddy, Elon Musk. The oil-rich nations also agreed to form business partnerships with Washington or to pump money into American companies. 'Trump is at home in the Gulf because he recognizes their style of family rule,' the diplomat told us. 'The Europeans gave up that method of governance about a century ago, but we know how to put on a show when we need to.' The Europeans have adopted similar tactics, not just spending lavishly with American defense contractors but also indulging Trump's interest in lineage, royalty, and, at times, even his romantic conquests. The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, presented Trump with the birth certificate of his grandfather, who was born in 1869 in the German town of Kallstadt. A European diplomat from a different country made sure to mention their attractive friend, whom Trump had once dated. And Støre, the Norwegian prime minister, brought a photo of the country's current king as a young boy playing with Franklin D. Roosevelt's Scottish terrier, Fala—a nod, again, to Trump's penchant for monarchies. The Norwegians also brought a little gift for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—his ancestral tree, tracing him back six generations to Norway. All of the machinations are, of course, a far cry from the simpler diplomatic cajoling of the aughts, when then–British Prime Minister Gordon Brown gifted then-President Barack Obama a penholder made from wood pulled from an anti-slavery ship, and in return, Obama gifted him 25 DVDs of classic movies—all available on Netflix or at a local video store and, according to news reports at the time, unplayable on British technology. For now, diplomats and world leaders must be content with trading tips, sharing advice, and hoping not to become the centerpiece of a cautionary tableau in the Oval Office. The most common piece of wisdom we heard from the foreign officials with whom we spoke was: Prepare, prepare, prepare, especially for the unexpected. One diplomat told us they had learned that the 'real press conference' was in many cases not the official one featuring the two leaders, but the Oval Office meeting beforehand, with members of the media present. And another diplomat's advice inadvertently underscored the earlier 'play the cards you have' counsel of his peer: 'Our trade is balanced,' this person told us, wryly. 'That's an insider tip—keep an even trade balance.'
UPI
an hour ago
- UPI
Russia fires 136 drones at Ukraine ahead of Trump-NATO head meeting
A Ukrainian firefighter works to extinguish a fire following mass Russian strikes in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Saturday, July 12, 2025. Over Sunday night, Russia fired 136 drones at Ukraine. Photo by Ukrainian State Emergency Service/UPI | License Photo July 14 (UPI) -- Russia fired 136 drones at Ukraine, Kyiv's air force said Monday, ahead of U.S. President Donald Trump's meeting with NATO head Mark Rutte, where the two are expected to announce a new weapons deal for their besieged European ally. The overnight attack began at 6:39 p.m. Sunday, and consisted of four surface-to-air missiles launched from Russia's Kursk region and the drones from several areas of Russia. The drones were reportedly Iran-made and -supplied Shahed unmanned aerial vehicle systems. Sixty-one of the drones were shot down and another 47 were either lost from radar or suppressed by electronic warfare, Ukraine's air force said, adding that 28 hit targets in 10 locations. "The air attack was repelled by aviation, anti-aircraft missile forces, electronic warfare units and drone systems, and mobile fire groups of the Ukrainian Defense Forces," it said in a statement on Telegram. The attack came as Trump is set to meet with Rutte, the NATO secretary general, on Monday. Rutte is in Washington, D.C., for a two-day trip ending Tuesday. Trump told a press gaggle at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on Sunday that he will send Ukraine Patriot air defense system munitions, with the bill to be covered by the European Union. He also mentioned his upcoming meeting with Rutte, stating they will be sending "various pieces of very sophisticated" military equipment to Ukraine "and they're going to pay us 100% for them." Trump's announcement comes as he has grown publicly frustrated with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump campaigned on ending the war in 24 hours, but since returning to the White House in January has failed to bring about a cease-fire. He has pursued a cease-fire plan, but has been unable to get a commitment from the Russian leader. Earlier this month, Trump and Putin spoke over the phone, after which the American president told reporters that he "didn't make any progress" toward securing a cease-fire. To reporters on Sunday, he said, "Putin really surprised a lot of people. He talks nice and then he bombs everyone in the evening. There's a bit of a problem there. I don't like it."
