KXEL Presents: The Jacobsen Group Podcast – March 21, 2026

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News Talk 1540 KXEL.

Good morning on the Jacobson Group here on KXEL, 1540, 100.5 FM.

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We're gonna have a wonderful show today.

We're gonna talk about free market enterprise economy.

And at the midpoint, some great entrepreneurs here in eastern Iowa.

That's the T's, guys.

And we thank our...

General sponsors as well, Jim and Cindy Jandron, who helped run that great enterprise Midwest Renewable Energy LLC out of South Eastern Nebraska.

Ethanol Renewable fuels energy for a strong America.

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Runners, liferunners.org.

Go to liferunners.org and order your t-shirt to run and walk for a life like the loving gracious Debra Jacobson does.

You know, it's also very healthy, guys.

If you walk 10,000 steps a day, you reduce your cardio risks by an incredible percentage, but also running and walking for life.

This group builds a culture of life helping.

expectant mothers and their babies along the way to birth and then after they're born.

LifeRunners.org, go to that website, Dr. Pat Castle, runs this wonderful operation and a lot of young college kids part of this too, young and old running together alike.

So we're going to have the great free marketers from out of you and the Gortney Institute on then Barbara Hames Bryant from the Hames Homes people and then part two of Gortney.

Guys, we are making free market enterprise great again.

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We'll be right back.

Economics is the study of human choice in the world we live.

Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.

By investigating faith in economics, we can learn how they lead to human flourishing.

This is the Faith in Economics podcast, a presentation of the Gortney Institute at Ottawa University.

Welcome to our show today.

My name is Peter Jacobson.

I'm the Gortney Professor of Economic Education and Research.

Joining me today, we have Dr. Jessen Clark, who is the Monard Family Professor of Philosophy and Ethics.

And also, we have Dr. Russ McCullough, the Wayne Angel Chair of Economics and founder of the Gautney Institute.

All right, I'm sure there's not a listener out there that's not familiar with Ozempic or Monjoro or other GLPs.

I think there's been quite a few that are blossoming up in different ways.

And Dr. Clark over here thought that might be a good topic for today.

So I'm going to let you take off the lead.

I got things to say, but Justin, why is this on your mind?

I

don't know.

It seems like a lot of people are using GLPs.

They seem to be wildly popular.

I can't watch anything on TV without getting ads of Venus Williams or whoever about Charles Barkley, one of my favorite people ever.

all talking about how they're on GLP-1 inhibitors, I think is what they are, right?

So that's the ozempic thing.

And then there's also, I have buddies who do like peptides for healing faster, which is I guess kind of ozempic related.

They get like vials of stuff that they will inject.

Yeah.

And so I don't know, it seems like this whole, this domain of medicine is new.

and interesting and exciting.

And it seems like whenever there is our horizons in a system like ours where things are new and exciting and promising, there's also room for a lot of charlatans and also for a lot of misrepresentation about costs and benefits.

And so I don't know, I'm wondering what you guys think of them.

I can also

see something that's maybe like parallel to the ways in which like the excitement around SSRIs when they first came out, like Zoloft and Prozac.

And so, yeah, I don't know.

Valium.

Back in the...

Valium way early.

That was sixties

or whatever.

SSRIs were nineties and they had the whole book like Prozac Nation.

And yeah, so

I don't know.

Yeah, there's a number of different topics.

So I'll just start off with confession.

It's really kind of potentially putting my wife under the table, but she's been a big fan of it.

So she openly talks about it with everybody.

So she was kind of in the pre-diabetic type phase, and this was probably just about a year ago, maybe a little over.

And so she got prescribed Monjaro.

and the weight came tumbling off.

So

yeah, it

was really good.

She's felt great about it.

More importantly, the blood sugar level, she was always pretty careful with monitoring that and that has improved.

And I think that's part of the whole picture is that they know it takes off weight and that people who are not having as much weight on, you know, there's improvements in diabetes.

So that's kind of the whole point.

But

it still has been kind of expensive for us and but there there's these things that uh maybe i'll get into more i don't want to get sidetracked on it too much right now but there are some price discrimination schemes that are kind of interesting with the stuff that i've learned about since going in so it was higher than other diabetes type you know medicines so there's other ones that the doctors try to prescribe because the insurance companies don't want to cover ozympic in manjaro because they're

They are expensive at this point in time, so I think some of that will change over time.

But anyway, I'll just leave it at that for now that my wife's a big fan.

She's been doing great.

The weight loss did kind of table off.

It tumbled off fast and then, but she's a good weight.

I think she might still like everybody want to take off a little bit more, but then that's where you, you know, can I bump up the Monroe and will that have that effect because she's on

whatever dosage, whether that would be impactful that way or not.

Yeah, that makes an interesting thing.

I will admit to having like a natural distrust off the bat.

And I think there's exceptions to the natural distrust too.

And so I generally think kind of like the natural law folks are pretty good about what medically should and shouldn't be done.

In general, the sense I get from those people, even though I'm not really, I have not studied enough on this show myself, is that you should do something or it is permissible and perhaps even the right thing to do, to do something that allows your body to operate as it should, but not to do something that inhibits proper body functioning.

And I think the who is what in with this case depends on the person.

That is, I do think there are some people whose bodies

are not allowing them to process calories the way that other people's bodies do, which makes it more difficult for them to lose weight.

And in that case, maybe Osempic is supporting their body's natural function rather than inhibiting it.

But what I don't like or the concept that I don't like is somebody who is eating significantly bad food consistently in large quantities and sort of using this as a means of escaping the consequence of that.

Because in that case, what you really do is you're inhibiting your body's natural function in order to indulge like an unnatural amount of consumption.

And so that's my take on it.

And I feel this way about weight loss surgery and all that.

And by the way, I think in the extreme, anybody could and should get on it.

And I also think if your body does not properly take off weight, you should get on it.

But I also think there's something to be said of like people who like have an eating issue.

of which I don't know anybody, but there are people who are obsessed with just putting away bad empty calories.

I think the better route for those people is diet and exercise, and I think people will be worse off for taking this route instead.

So amazing technological innovation will help a lot of people who need help.

I hope there are no long run consequences.

Like Justin mentioned with the SSRIs, people are starting to come around and think those maybe actually have more negatives than positives in a lot of cases.

as this happened with many drugs.

I hope that doesn't happen with ozempic, but I could imagine it.

So that's my general take, is I think that ozempic is permissible by case.

And of course, you could do whatever you want, but from a moral perspective, I don't always think shortcuts are a good idea.

But for some people, it's not a shortcut.

For some people, the normal route is not available.

And for those people, I think this is an effective

way.

Okay, before we go much further, I'm sure there's got to be at least a few other listeners.

What's SSRI?

selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.

Those are like Prozac, Zoloft.

And it diminished your appetite or?

No, for depression and anxiety.

Oh, Prozac.

Right, right,

right.

Yeah, but we're really starting to beat.

And now they're coming up with some long-term

stuff.

Well, they were also used for things like OCD behavior and bipolar disorder.

And

And my understanding, and again, I'm not a pharmacist or a medical doctor or anything, is that a lot of the ways SSRIs work and actually maybe a similar way that like Valium works is that it can help bring your highs and lows closer together, right?

So you're not doing these manic swings.

A lot of people have to be, a lot of people who were originally prescribed

psychotropic, effective medicine had to be forced to take the initial doses because a lot of times people who are manic enjoy being manic.

They don't want that part of their lives taken away.

And I think that a lot of the times one of the things, one of the side effects you find from people on SSRIs, there's one famously people on SSRIs that are sexual.

you can develop sexual problems and orgasm.

So this is a very common side effect to SSRIs.

And that goes in general with this idea that though they prevent those huge spikes of highs and lows, they in general just flatten you out.

And in the same way that we might think that super big highs and lows are a problem, we also might think

that a lack of high and low at all, a lack that's been called in the literature, a lack of affect, a flattening of affect, that can be a problem too.

And I bring it up because I read that with Osempic that we hit

It originally, they knew that it reduces people's cravings for food.

And but it also seemed to reduce people's cravings for things like cocaine and gambling, sex, sex and

like everything just kind of like,

yes, that

is muted or

not.

So apparently, even like that same sight of your brain, if you read the articles that say this is the same side of your brain, that's where like romantic

love

falling in love lives too.

I don't really like that.

I think like you rip up someone's skull and you go, look, there's the love.

But I do think that when we start altering people's brain chemistry, we need to be very careful.

And so, and I bring this up just because I only hear good things about OZMPIC.

And so it makes me worried in the same way that I think we ought to have been worried in the 90s with the development of SSRIs.

Or if you look back in the 40s and you look at what they were saying about DDT or whatever, you're only getting the good information.

And I'm wondering, are we worried about or even being told some of the negatives that can come from this?

And, you

know,

classically, another example of consequences that we don't see right off the bat is the pill, a contraceptive pill, which

limits, it turns out like women can't detect pheromones as well, whether on the pill.

So, and it might end up not you not having a initially just emotionally averse reaction to somebody that you would have had you not been on the pill.

It's also a class one percentage.

Yeah.

And so

Just this idea that whenever I see something like, oh, this is new, this is the new frontier in medicine, and would you believe it?

It's all benefits and no costs.

Yeah.

Same thing with the, what was the Netflix show that was on recently about the pill that was the painkiller?

Yeah, the oxycon.

The oxycon was

the greatest thing of all time.

So Peter, I just wanted to clarify something that

the way you were saying, if it the natural body versus this, as Justin was just pointing out, the Zempik and these other things are reducing the amount you're eating.

So even if you were overeating bad and you kind of wanted to leave the natural hand of, Hey, I'm fat.

So let me correct myself, correct that behavior.

This drug is actually just reducing the appetite.

So you're, you're taking in less, like I'm just not hungry is the common thing.

And so Dana's

you know intake and desire to eat or snack or sugar or just all of that went down.

So you're taking in less rather than continuing to be able to eat.

So I think like with the surgery people would continue to expand their stomach because they were still eating the same volumes of stuff and it's not doing that.

This is actually reducing the intake.

Yeah, my suspicion is that there are people out there who, with their remaining diet, are eating M&Ms and Pepsi.

But they're remaining appetite.

And that is what I would be a very stewing concern about.

But I think that the bigger issue, and this is how I feel about plastic surgery in general, is that I'm generally opposed to plastic surgery because for the most part, it's like introducing a foreign thing that is not really associated with your body.

in order to make your body something other than what it is for the most part.

But if someone is in like a fire and like they're, well, they've had skin melted over their eyes, they can't see by doing plastic surgery and making that not be the case anymore, you're allowing their body to function as it's supposed to.

And so for me, I think that's the big question is like the people who are on ozempic, I think the big

Moral concern I have is are they doing it because it's difficult for their body to process fats which happens to some people And so I hold no ill will to towards those people whose body or that what is that way or is it a completely avoidable thing that they themselves like there's a difference between is it hard for you to lose weight or Do you just want to like eat yourself to obesity?

Yeah,

and I think the latter case I Honestly, I prefer they take the drug to have serious health consequences.

And so in that sense, it's a good thing but

There's something to be said, I think, of fighting through if you can, again, admitting that people have different roads to that.

Yeah.

And listeners, this is coming from a guy who's very thin and you can eat like a horse and it doesn't change his weight.

So take that.

I don't know if all listeners know where people are at, but that's,

yeah.

Yeah, 100%.

I don't think that... I think there are lots of people who have like...

serious medical reasons to take weight loss drugs and that's totally fine.

My issue would be if someone is putting themselves in a bad position and bailing themselves out with something that is like inhibiting their body.

I just think it's a bad idea in the long run and I'm not gonna scold them.

There's somebody here at OU that was very obese her whole life and did the surgery and she had the brain effects and was now disabled the rest of her life.

Wow.

It was really sad.

Yeah, that's the scary thing.

That's what I would hope to avoid.

So if you can avoid stuff like this, kind of like with the SSRIs, SSRIs we talked about, like, I don't know, in my opinion, you always want to avoid intervention if possible.

Sure.

Because like, your body is pretty decent at what it does.

And so when you mess with it, you tinker with it, there can be unintended consequences, right?

I'm kind of the same way about body as I am economy, like, thousands of years of like... Hands up.

Yeah, yeah.

All of a sudden, we're like introducing these shocks to the system.

It's like...

You gotta be careful, right?

I wanted to comment, it's probably because I just got done teaching macroeconomics, but the ups and downs, there's business cycle theory too of, you know, the business, the economy goes through its ups and downs and is a good idea for government to step in and try to smooth out the ride.

And so Peter and I both fall in the camps where the government jumping in and trying to smooth out the ride actually puts our long-term trajectory in a worse

path than if we had maybe had less intervention to do it.

And so that was the corollary I thought of when you said the smoothing part can sometimes lead to negative things that we might not know for a while.

Yeah.

And I think that, you know, I think what both of you said is correct.

And one thing I think that one of my camera at home with what Peter said is that I'm not saying something like we need to figure out if the costs and the benefits, if the benefits outweigh the costs,

Overall, then we can decide whether everybody should have them or not.

My point is the costs and benefits are going to be different for each individual.

And we need to make sure that individuals know what those costs are because the only thing I'm hearing is the benefits.

So it could very well be the case that something like we've done the math and on average, the benefits outweigh the costs for the average person.

But that doesn't mean that for everybody,

if it's going to outweigh the costs.

And that means it's perfectly compatible with a very large percentage of people having to cost outweigh the benefits.

All right, well, this looks like a good spot for break.

When we come back, I definitely want to get into a discussion about the actual monetary cost and what we think the economics of that will be over time as well.

And then I have an amazing South Park recommendation.

So we'll be back in just a bit.

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Ottawa University has an exciting new major, PPE, which stands for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics.

Each of these fields is interesting in their own right, but they intersect in ways that are important to understand both individually and for your community.

If you find philosophy fascinating but want to make sure that your study of the subject is practical, if you enjoy economic analysis but want to see how economic laws interact with more principles, if you are interested in politics but want to explore how economic and ethical realities constrain our political choices,

you should consider the PPE program at Ottawa University.

This spring, Ottawa University is organizing a PPE League competition or Politics, Philosophy and Economics.

Students in this competition will compete leveraging the ideas of philosophy, politics and economics in various events.

If you're a professor or an advisor of college students and you're interested in your school competing in PPE League this spring, contact Peter, Justin or Russ today.

By 2030, the Gorton Institute will be known for its alumni, supporters, and participants who incorporate economic understanding with their faith in their careers, vocations, communities, and personal lives.

We have some great programming going on for high school students.

We have an online microeconomics class.

Yes, you can earn college credit for $200 by taking an online class.

It's affordable, flexible, layered with support.

Our new online micro is optimized for you.

If you'd like to consider some events for your high school students or that class, please contact Justin, Peter or Russ today.

All right, so we're back and I'm going to start off with the South Park episode.

It was so funny.

I found out it's on Paramount Plus.

which I just picked up because MMA UFC is now under OnePlus.

So I think while I was looking for UFC, I'm like, oh, there's a self work about about it's called the end of obesity.

And it's so that's their GLP episode.

It is hilarious.

So Cartman ends up getting on it.

And that's all I'll say.

So if you're interested in this topic, it brings up as usual, a great set.

about the various topics we're bringing up.

So people who are interested in weight loss, I don't know if it's changed or how much it's changed, I think it's heading the direction I would predict, but $1,000 a month is what I heard, so I mean some people, I mean my wife's mom even said, well maybe we could help you out with it, like literally on the table for discussing, like if weight loss is important to you and I couldn't help but think what a great

test ground the United States is as usual, but especially in this case as fat rich Americans, right?

I mean, this drug is just teed up perfectly to be a test case.

And unfortunately, that means we're going to be the guinea pigs for these long effects.

But we have a lot of people that are shelling out $1,000 a month because they are not in a physical condition that allows them to get it.

covered through health insurance.

And so it's definitely a luxury good.

And so I kind of think it fits the American profile pretty well for us as our incomes rise that you can afford these types of medicines.

And then on the flip side, we have probably economies of scale kicking in to where these drug companies want to make Osempic being probably right at the top of the list, but I'm sure Monjaro and other ones, they put a lot of research and development for years and years.

And so there's not

a big pool of buyers at first and so they're needing to charge a thousand dollars a month or whatever their price is to really even cover their costs and of course attempt to get some of their previous research and development covered.

make money while the hey uh while the sun shines

kind of comes to my

head make yeah make a while the sun shines um is kind of the saying and i think these businesses because we're going to have competitors and copycats and buying it internationally um you know all of those things are going to kick in pretty fast but also what will kick in is economies of scale so if ozempic

uh used to sell you know just to make up a number of thousand when it first came out and now because of its popularity and awareness of what it can do and the impact it's having on people's lives if they can sell 10,000 well they can mass produce that at a much lower rate and so we should see because of economies of scale prices coming down and I think that's already begun as well.

and the more it gets prescribed even for other people.

So I don't know, those are some long-term effects from the industry that I thought between competition and economies of scale internally, these GLPs, if they are the wonder drug that they claim to be, should be coming down in price.

Yeah, the effect I was familiar with that I did some reading on related to, like, macroecon and econ was the effect on substitutes and compliments.

But I don't want to take us there before if Justin has anything to say about what Russ just said.

No, $1,000 a month, though, seems pretty cost prohibitive for a lot of people.

Oh,

yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, that looks like a good spot to wrap.

So this has been a production of the Courtney Institute here at Ottawa University.

I'd like to thank you all for listening.

and five star rating helps other people find us so the lines just pass us along to people that might like to take a

list.

This is Weight Watchers.

Built for real life and real results.

No matter what mode you're in.

Maddie went all in for her big day and lost 33 pounds.

Emily lost 85 pounds and hit her goal while still living her life.

Weight Watchers gave me the tools and I feel amazing.

Join the millions of members and lose weight with the number one doctor recommended weight loss program.

Get started at weightwatchers.com slash works.

At six months, participants in the

clinical trial of Weight Watchers program lost an average of 12 pounds.

If you're enjoying this KXEL podcast, then we invite you to listen to KXEL's great programming in real time too.

You can hear us on the radio, statewide at AM 1540 and in the Cedar Valley at FM 100.5.

We stream live on the web, not only through KXEL.com, but also through our free KXEL mobile app.

and Alexa knows how to find us too.

It's where Iowa comes to talk, News Talk 1540, KXEL.

Welcome back on this glorious weekend.

My goodness, we've gone from single digits to the 90s here in Iowa over this past week, and we've got the great Barbara Hames Bryant, Hames Holmes, the matriarch,

This multi-generational family of excellence that's bringing safe, affordable, beautiful homes to all of us here in eastern Iowa.

They've been doing it for more than half century under the aegis of the great late Kurt and Norma Hames and to prove over half century of excellence.

We're going to go in the archives over a half century ago and surprise you with a vignette called Surprised.

Just a short snippet, but there were others such as this one here, Barbara

Haymes Bryant.

How

great it was to hear the voice of Curt Hames again on radio, caring through 20 states and four Canadian provinces, Barbara.

Oh, that is so cool listening to my dad's voice again.

He was one of a kind, wasn't he?

He was absolutely the best.

He was a great inspiration to me to give me the courage to embark.

on some citizenship in the Iowa legislature.

And Barbara, when he held court there in Cedar Rapids at the country club, we were among giants.

He bestowed like a Colossus, he did, Kurt Haymes.

Well, he was great at bringing people together.

He called them getting together, and I called them power lunches.

They were the ultimate power lunches.

And what he did was he built this great custodial tradition that you now

as the torch was passed to you.

And now even to this next generation, we've had Curtis and Clint on of late as well.

You guys are doing it bigger and better than ever.

And I notice how even going back 50 years ago, how Curt used the term manufactured homes.

That's what these are.

You know what I didn't notice that, but that's true.

The homes are manufactured homes, not mobile homes.

Manufactured homes are built to a far better standard than the old mobile homes.

Here's a question for you.

When was the last time a mobile home was built?

The answer, 1976.

I

did

not know that.

Yes, since 1976, they have been manufactured homes.

Half a century.

Yeah, somebody has a mobile home that better than built before 1977.

Indeed, indeed.

Well, you've got beautiful manufactured homes.

Things are greening up now on these beautifully landscaped, well kept, well lit, beautiful pavement.

They're at both Summit View and Grand View.

Talk a little bit about those magnificent communities.

I've been there.

It's everything great about Americana.

Oh, Don, I'm glad you mentioned that.

Grand View Village and Summit View Village are two lovely neighborhoods in Southwest Cedar Rapids.

They're planned, private, managed neighborhoods where you know your neighbor with strings before they move in.

Everyone agrees to a set of rules and regulations so that everyone has a great quality of life.

Folks keep the outsides of their homes up nice and their yards are lovely and I've seen some folks starting to plant some flowers already.

It's great.

It is and spring has definitely sprung.

Barbara, Hames Bryant, one thing that I'm impressed by is you've got a variety of options for young families, for downsizers, for 55 plus, even for, dare I say now, people like Deb and me, 66 or 65 plus.

That's correct.

We're an all age community, a community as I should say.

We have everything from newborns to 92 year olds, single moms.

big families, little families, single guys, people starting out and people retiring.

Here with Barbara Hames Bryant, the bottom line always is can we afford to do this?

And folks, Hames has a great financing office, as Clint and Curtis have told us about, as well as insurance.

And they've winnowed down this process.

It's not a cerbonian bog, a sort of Damocles hanging over red tape here.

They make it easy.

And Barbara, rates are definitely on a downward trend.

This portends well for a springtime move.

Yes, our listeners will be so surprised when they find out how affordable a manufactured home is, even with the loan.

The home site rent is part of the package, so that includes the taxes on the land and includes 24-hour maintenance for water fees and garbage fees.

And then on top of that, folks would have a payment on their home.

But the great part is, when they're done paying off their loan, they own their home.

In contrary to popular belief, manufactured homes do not depreciate.

our experience has been, they all go up in value.

There's a great blog post about that very thing, folks.

Get to the HamesHomes.com website and check that out.

Barbara, final thing I want you to touch on amenities.

You've got everything from parks to storm shelters to pantries.

You guys have so many amenities at your communities.

That's right, John, and we're still looking for more.

We do have a food pantry that all of our residents are welcome to do twice a week.

We have two parks and playgrounds in each of our communities, Grandview and Summit View.

We have two emergency storm shelters each in Grandview and Summit View.

As I mentioned before, we have on-call 24-7 management, resident events, and we have a walking trail, basketball hoop, and a dog park.

And you're five minutes from the airport, five minutes from CR hospitals, 15 minutes to see all the Hawkeye action.

You're in a pastoral landscape backdrop with literally five minutes to all the retail and great restaurants.

It's perfectly situated.

Barbara, I've talked about the Hames Homes website.

How can they drive and find you and how can they call you on that beautiful Marion legacy number that's near and dear to my heart?

We hope people will come and visit Grandview and Summit View.

We're at the corner of Wilson Avenue and West Post Road, Southwest.

So that's Wilson Avenue, West Post Road.

Grandview and Summit View are about a half a mile apart.

We're open seven days a week for folks to come and look at our beautiful model homes, or they can call us at 319-377-4863.

319-377.

4863.

And we've had that number since 1969.

So most people know that number.

It is.

That's a memorized number.

And I can tell you get to that website.

Hames, H-A-M-E-S, Holmes, H-O-M-E-S dot com.

Check out all the info there and catch those great retro television commercials.

Again, as some of you know, I'm essentially emeritus president of the Iowa Broadcast News Association.

There will be a proud place in our archives for some of the greatest commercials that formed me in my youth, whether I was watching Gunsmoke or the Lucy Show, or you name it, Mission Impossible, Green Acres, those Hames ads were playing back in the day, and that cemented my love for Hames Homes, Barbara.

Well, I'm glad you loved it because we all love it too.

And that's why we still play Neil Diamond instrumental music here.

A little cracklin' Rosie to span the years.

Barbara Hames Bryant, thank you so much for joining us again this week.

You make your mother and father proud by your great custodial stewardship of this tremendous legacy.

Thank you, John.

And one more thing, go Hawks.

Go Hawks!

I love my Hawkeyes!

Go Hannah and go coach McCullough and men and women.

Take it, seize the day.

And we will continue to seize the day on the other side of this break after we come right back.

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Economics is the study of human choice in the world we live.

Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.

By investigating faith in economics, we can learn how they lead to human flourishing.

This is the Faith in Economics podcast, a presentation of the Gortney Institute at Ottawa University.

Welcome to our show today.

My name is Peter Jacobson.

I'm the Gortney Professor of Economic Education and Research.

Joining us today, we have Dr. Justin Clark, the Minority Family Professor of Philosophy and Ethics.

Also Dr. Russ McCullough, the Wayne Angel Chair of Economics and the founder of the Courtney Institute.

All right, it's time to put a little faith into our Faith in Economics podcast.

So Justin's got something that seems like a big topic.

So I'm really excited to get into it and I'll just let you introduce it.

Go ahead, Justin.

So I've been thinking for a while about the Bible and also DNA and how I think a really good way to think about the Bible is that it is

the DNA for Western civilization.

And to explain kind of what I mean by that, I want to take a quick detour into like what exactly DNA is and how DNA works in a human.

There's a great book.

They won the Pulitzer Prize.

It's called Girdle, Escher Bach.

And in Swan chapter, the author

Hofstetter talks about the way DNA works.

And DNA, remember, it's those GATC pairs of amino acids, right?

And every individual has a unique DNA.

It's finite.

But what happens is when a sperm and an egg meet, right, a new DNA is generated, and for every single stage of the development of the individual,

The part of the individual that's developing takes its instructions from that DNA.

So DNA tells an 8-celled organism how to expand into a 16-celled organism.

DNA tells your fingernails how to grow into fingernails.

DNA instructs your eyeballs how to make an eyeball.

And it's a bit like if you thought about a phonograph playing a record.

DNA is its own

self-playing record.

And it's a record that keeps replaying itself.

And every time it replays itself, it gives itself a new set of instructions, which it can follow correctly or incorrectly.

And if it follows, then it repeats that same set of instructions in the sense that it'll be the same amino acids, GATC, the same amino acids in the same order, will tell a fingernail how to be

how to grow as a fingernail, and it will also tell an eyeball when to stop growing as an eyeball.

So it's the exact same amino acids in the same order, and it directs, controls, and tells the organism how to grow.

And so that's just a strictly scientific view of the way DNA operates in human growth, right?

And then you can go wrong with DNA, right?

If your telomeres get messed up or if your cells start making copies of themselves in ways that DNA doesn't recommend, they can go really wrong with your body, right?

And if your DNA gets messed up, that's one of the things that can happen.

Great.

Okay.

So that's the DNA part of this.

And then

Over the past like 10 years or whatever having read a bunch of books like Thomas Woods how the church built Western civilization You can kind of see how And I think this is becoming much more Much more popular to talk about in the past eight years or so is the way in which Christianity has served as a cultural strata that the West has grown out of right and

not only has the West grown out of Christianity, but the rest, the West took off arguably because of Christianity.

And it brought Christianity to places where Christianity didn't exist.

Like, you can look at the history of missionaries in New Guinea, for example, where they start proclaiming the word of Jesus Christ and get people who were previously cannals to stop their practice.

And so on, and then I'd also read a long article a while ago, I think it was by, might have been by Justin Murphy, who said that religion is a technology for the transmission of culture, which seems anthropologically to me.

to be correct.

That is one of the things that religion does really well is transmit culture.

And we've also seen a bunch of, and this is what somebody like Nietzsche said, and what somebody like Kierkegaard said too, is that to the extent that the West is headed down a road of abandoning Christianity, people in the West better be careful because they don't realize the degree to which all of our moral systems

our virtues, our vices, these all follow from Christianity and are based in Christianity and we don't realize how many of them are going to topple to the extent that we abandoned Christianity.

Now, the viewpoint of the Bible as DNA of Western civilization might go something like, in the same way that DNA, when an organism is following the instructions of its DNA, at every different stage of that organism,

the same, it's one of the things that's crazy about DNA is that it's the same set of instructions, but that when different organisms read those instructions, that different organism gets told to do a different thing, but it's always the right thing for that organism.

Does that make sense?

Always the right thing.

If it's not uncor- I was just thinking when it's when DNA is bad or what, you know, with DNA slicing, but

yeah, so you can read it wrongly.

Okay.

But

The thing about DNA is there's no DNA reading that's, oh, it means the DNA reading always means keep growing because you're a fingernail, because that's not what it means for eyeballs.

Does that make sense?

Okay.

Yeah.

Sure.

And it would seem to me to be at least pretty good evidence that a text is supernatural or divine if no matter what society is interpreting it, it

seems to always guide them in the right direction.

Sure.

Okay.

Yeah.

In the same way that we recognize that DNA does provide a roadmap for the telos of an individual's physical growth.

And there are ways to screw that up.

But there isn't, yeah, I guess I'll stop there.

Yeah, I think it's a good metaphor, perhaps the right way to think about it.

And to continue on your last point, so

What an alternative reading could be that, like, well, maybe it is something that just dominates and destroys and squeezes out everything else.

And I don't think that's right either, because if, for example, you look at, like, Roman Catholicism as an example, people will tell you that American Roman Catholicism is very different than, like, Italian Roman Catholicism.

That, like, they're very different expressions.

In fact, like, the European Catholics always joke that American Roman Catholics are Protestants for various reasons.

has knocked into specifics of that.

The point is that it actually does seem like something like your culture can persist in the vein of Christianity that comes to you without being totally destroyed, but without being completely maintained the way it was before, right?

So the list of instructions is a list of instructions, so people have to do things in response.

If part of your culture is ritualistic cannibalism, that part does disappear because the instructions say that's not part of it, right?

Just like if your cells were like self-immolating because they had maybe a bad list of instructions.

If a good list of instructions came along, they would stop self-immolating, right?

Something like that.

But there also remain like particular cultural expressions, right, within Christianity.

And so it doesn't quite demolish culture or replace it.

but it does kind of provide a unifying positive undergirding.

And to speak a little bit to what you were saying as regards how much we rely on it without realizing, I think a good example that I've noticed lately across like several different examples and experiments and videos and stuff like that is the concept of like integrity, especially as regards like social and public programs.

So I think Christianity is extremely valuable for

trying to ensure that people don't abuse like public and social programs that are like aimed at like for example the needy and so it's no surprise that like Defrauding the government is actually not very difficult right like the government does not have enough employees to monitor all the recipients of government largesse and Because of that a significant number of people who to try to defraud the government largesse are just gonna get away with it, right and

I think one of the reasons that a lot of like Western countries are able to have these big kind of like welfare state systems, which the United States to some degree has this, you see like the Norwegian, you know, what are these, the Slavic now?

What are these countries?

Nordic?

Yeah, Nordic.

That's right.

Not Slavic Nordic.

The Nordic countries have these and what they have in common is they're very like trust dependent.

In other words, if you've got somebody in there who

was intentionally exploiting the system.

If you get a critical mass of those people, the whole thing actually falls apart.

We were having a book club, well, a colloquium a couple weeks ago where we were talking about international trade.

And of course, whenever you talk about international trade in the modern day, you have to talk about China.

One of the readings that we had talked about how China takes kind of the rule systems that the United States has set up, both internally and in international organizations, and they exploit the rule systems.

So the rule systems kind of imply that everybody's gonna follow the spirit of the law, but what China does is they instead take like the lean letter of the law interpretation, but basically undermine the rules within the letter of the law.

And I think the reason that this happens is that in some cultures historically, and this has again been kind of forgotten in the West,

Being dishonest, for example, is actually acceptable, so long as you're dishonest to an outsider, right?

There are a lot of cultures for which dishonesty is completely allowable, and sometimes even morally praiseworthy, if it's somebody who's not part of the culture.

That's pretty much foreign to Christianity, right?

Christ's teaching of who is your neighbor, the Good Samaritan parable, combined with this idea of...

pursuing the spirit of the law rather than the letter of the law basically squeezes out any sort of like tricky deceptive exception to rules like this, right?

Like if you're a Christian walking in integrity, there's never going to be an instance where you like can get away with like harming somebody else for your benefits and still be following Christianity.

And so I think that's so deep in society's DNA.

that in Western society's D.A.

that a lot of these systems that we've made that are essentially trust based systems have operated because people have operated under the principles of I'm not going to try to mess up something for somebody else just because they're an outsider or I'm not going to take advantage of something set up by a different community.

Like those sorts of norms I don't think work without Christianity.

And I think that's one of the things that America is going to have to grapple with pretty significantly, both internally when there's changes and also in international organizations.

So I was hoping you can maybe comment a little bit the Protestant work ethic.

So Max Weber was famous.

I don't remember the exact date, but at the beginning of the United States of pointing out that Christians and Christianity Protestants had

a different way of looking at things and that that was really the seeds of flourishing that would come to be in the United States.

So when you were talking about Western culture and all that, I didn't know if Max Weber came to mind with that being part or baked into the DNA and that helped cultivate things.

I think that kind of follows exactly what Peter said about, you know, that the virtues and vices that we get in Christianity, they just

do result in a very particular kind of culture.

And I think as Peter pointed out, it's dangerous to feed, you know, to use the DNA metaphor again, to feed an organism that has been developed on one from one DNA, if you give it, if you either allow it to ignore the instructions that the DNA has so that has so far governed its

growth.

Are you importing some different DNA?

This is terminal, usually, to those biological organisms.

One of the things that I thought that I think really made me think about this was when we did that reading group on...

Gerard's interpretation of the Gospels.

And he says, one of the things that's really interesting is if you contrast how the Gospels treat sacrifice and scapegoating compared to how the myths do, right?

And I take it that one thing we could say is something like that this reading was like in the Gospels, but we didn't

We actually didn't realize it until much later.

And the thesis that I'm putting forward is something like, that will continue to happen.

There will be meanings that maybe are unavailable to us in the same way that the myth, the critique of sacrifice in myth reading of the gospel was unavailable to a peasant in, you know, 400 AD or whatever, that this is the view on

how a text like the Bible can continue to be relevant and governing for something that is always changing.

Right.

It's fixed, but the reader is getting different messages at different times.

And amazingly, if the organism reads the DNA right, it gets the right message, right?

This isn't a kind of relativism that says there's no wrong reading of it.

If you read DNA wrong, you get cancer, you get, you know, but that there will be

some things that emerge much later on.

I mean, like when people do the analysis of the Bible and they go like, oh my, look at all these connections that maybe weren't there on a First Apparent reading.

Yeah.

So, all right,

well, this looks like a good spot for break.

The thing we haven't touched on, and Peter kind of hinted at it, the topic I want to get into, and that's sin.

I think the how sin is baked into the part of the DNA and the forgiveness of sin plays an important role here, too, that

in cultivating that culture.

Well, this has been a production of the Gordon Institute here at Ottawa University.

I'd like to thank you all for listening.

You can find us on all of major podcast apps and pass us out to friends that family that might like to take a listen.

Other than that, be fruitful and multiply.

Thanks.

you

Thanks again, guys.

Tell your friends about the podcast, kxel.com slash Jacobson, J-A-C-O-B-S-E-N.

In the meantime, listen to all the wisdom of Jeff Stein during his weekday news and commentary.

And folks, always remember and never forget to be safe, be smart, be good, be strong.

Love Jesus Christ.

And God blesses everyone.

Till we meet again, have a great weekend and

bye-bye!

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