Let Us Talk True Crime with J. Warner Wallace

The Value of Christian Community and Shared Mentors

Well, welcome to another edition of the Wrap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rapoport, the Executive Director of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community, of which this podcast is a proud member of the over 50 heavily vetted podcasts.

We actually reject most people. We only accept, I think, about 30 of the people that apply. So what that means is you know that when you're listening, son, you're listening to something that has passed a vetting process, but we have something for everyone.

You want homeschooling? We have podcasts on homeschooling. We have podcasts. We have podcasts for just people that are going to read the Bible and give you devotions. We have people, ones that are sermons.

We have things for mothers, fathers. We have ones even on, you know, thinking critically about movies. So whatever you like, I'm sure you'll find something at ChristianPodcastCommunity .org. I am excited today because we have a guest who, well, I consider him a friend.

We'll find out if he thinks the reverse, but now he's put on the spot. So he's going to have to feel like he says yes. So we'll see what he puts on social media if he says yes. But Jim Wallace, he's known as J. Warner Wallace because there's, well, another Jim Wallace and he's not in Christian realms.

He's a liberal. So I wanted to have some distinction. It's been a long time since you've been on the show, Jim. Welcome back.

Hey, thanks for having me. I can tell you a funny. Yes, of course. You and I go back to the very beginning of, I think the first year that I was even speaking after I came out of law enforcement, I think I was still actually employed as a detective and I think I had a case in trial maybe the next year.

So maybe it was well before. We did a conference in Northern California. I don't know if you remember that. But that's when we first met and I'll tell you a funny story about Jim Wallace, the other Jim Wallace from Sojourners.

I was asked several years ago to come out for a session and justice reform session in Washington DC. A lot of people there in politics, people, civic leaders, people that were there who are faith leaders.

So it was basically a faith based kind of reform of social justice. So okay, great. So I go to this meeting. And when I get there, I walk into the room, it's in downtown Washington DC, and I walk into the room and there's tables set with little name tags and I can see that at one of the tables, there's Jim Wallace, but it's spelled the way he spells his name, which is W-A-L-L-I-S.

So I thought, oh, finally, I'm going to get to meet the guy because you're right, it was Greg Kokel. I was on his podcast. I used to be on his podcast all the time when I first started and when he would have me, he'd say, hey, you need to change your name because people think that I'm having Jim Wallace from Sojourners on when I'm having you on.

So that's when I first started using the name that I use in all my search warrants, which has my grandfather's name in it, J. Warner Wallace. That's how I ended up being J. Warner Wallace. So when I walked into this meeting in Washington DC and I saw that name tag, I thought, oh, I'm finally going to get a chance to meet Jim Wallace.

And so I did. And so when he comes in, I walk over, I recognize him, I walk over and I introduce myself. I'm nobody. He doesn't know me from anybody. He probably still doesn't know me from anybody, but I said to him, hey, you know, you're the reason why I'm J. Warner Wallace.

And I told him the story and he laughed and we shook hands. And that was the last probably agreeable thing we said to each other for the rest of the day, because we come at that issue of justice reform in two very different angles.

And the room was divided. You know, that's what they invited, a very broad spectrum of people. Yeah. So he and I are, in terms of the kinds of ways we would approach, even though, isn't that interesting?

Even though we would both say that we ground our worldview in Scripture, we came at it completely different. And I think that's actually one chapter of this book that I just wrote, because I think that we were reflecting two sides of the polar nature of who we are that is in God's nature, you know, truth and grace, justice and mercy.

And if you don't hold those two things in balance, you're not loving like God loves. And so you've got to be careful to hold those two things in balance. And in that room that day, you had people who were holding one side or the other completely out of balance.

And so we were pretty polarized. But anyway, that was another story. But yeah, I did get a chance to meet him.

Well, see, that's different than the Andrew Rappaport that does spell the same way as I do, because it has given me some very interesting situations. Because I have had, and it's actually Andrew S. Rappaport, I'm Andrew R. Rappaport.

But the other Andrew Rappaport is a venture capitalist. So I've had Dennis Kamenich, when he was running for the Democrats, running for president, his office reached out to me wanting, you know, it's like, and it was really fun.

I worked at Lucent Technologies at the time. So they contacted me at my Lucent email. Right? And I'm like, you really should realize that. It's the wrong guy. But they contacted me. And Dennis wanted to have dinner with me to, you know, talk about his platform.

And my response was, I decided I'm voting for Bush this year.

Oh, my gosh, I wonder if he ever figured out that there was a difference. Yeah, who knows.

But I've had, I had once where a woman in church, she invited a friend to church. And then she told me like a couple weeks later that her friend gave her a business proposal. And, and she was like, you know, can you give this to your pastor?

She's like, why? He's a big venture capitalist. And she goes, yeah, no, I know him. Yeah, he doesn't have that money. Yeah, that's not funny. And I remember speaking, I had the same thing at a crisis pregnancy center banquet.

And I, you know, I was speaking, and someone had, I guess, looked up who the speakers are, and looked up and found the other one. And so she came, he has been a wife, and she comes up to me, and she had a business proposal for me.

And I'm like, I'm the other Andrew Rappaport, the one without money. And they were like, oh, that's so funny. Yeah, and they're disappointed. I'm sure right away. Right? Because we can't offer them what they're hoping.

So yeah. Well, yeah. So, so you and I both been really blessed by the by the same person you already mentioned, Greg Kokel. That's how we kind of knew each other. Greg really, when I got into ministry, Greg really helped me out tremendously.

I knew him back when I was still pastoring a church. And I was able to just gleam a whole lot from him and just sit and talk to him. And a lot of the Ministry of Striving Fraternity is based upon Greg.

That's so cool. Yeah, I mean, he's had a great influence on us. And that's one of the things I think we can look at to us is this is kind of where my even my writing is, is transitioning is that, you know, we, we have an opportunity to have a kind of a legacy impact, hopefully.

And when I think about when I first started in, in this came out as out of law enforcement, I think Greg was probably about maybe a year older than I am now. So so at the age that I am now, Greg was, you know, mentoring me and embraced me right away.

And I became part of his team. And then we, you know, off to the races we go. And so I've always felt like he and Frank Turek, I've been two guys that I'm indebted to just for opportunities, if nothing else, just the fact that they were so gracious with their opportunities.

So, so, you know, how do you pass that forward? I remember when I first wrote the first book, Cold Case Christianity, I was, I pitched it and, and I sent a copy of the pitch to Lee Strobel just to see if maybe he would be interested in endorsing it.

That's one of those things you do with publishers, right? Well, how many people would be willing to endorse this? And when I did, Lee Strobel wrote back and said, well, I'll write the foreword for you.

He didn't know me from Adam. And I mean, I think we had met once at a conference and I was in, you know, in one of the breakout sessions and he was the plenary, but I was nobody to him and he so graciously has invested in me.

Well, it's kind of the same way you see when you feel like you take a view of grace, what's been offered you from God, that that is the motivation, not that you are doing this as transactionally with God, but that you feel like, wow, as far as everything that's been done for me, how can I not do for others?

And I think that when you see the community that operates that way, they're continually pouring into you with nothing in it for them really, but they just, that's just who they are. Well, then you just want, now you're looking around for who can I help?

Who can I bless the same way I've been blessed? And so, yeah, I think that's been great, a great role, a role model for both of us.

Using Your Background to Serve Others

Well, I mean, so let me start with Greg and then I'll get to how you have influenced how we train people. But one of the things Greg taught me, and I see this every event, you know, Greg walks into an event and he is not going to a green room.

He is not going, he walks in and first thing he's walking around and just talking to people. And he's the one that said, he said, look, if someone flies you out to an event, you are there to do whatever you can possibly do for their event.

You're not there for your own time. That's right. You're there for them from the moment you land to the moment you take off. And that's been my policy. I mean, he really, I did an event where our ministry was organizing it and we had someone that ran the conference and the guy kind of came up to me because somebody wanted to have Greg not be in the main session, but be in their session to give feedback.

And that someone was me. Okay. So I'm asking Greg if he could sit in on a breakout session I'm doing rather than be in the main session. And Greg said, well, let me, let me talk to Michael, the guy that was running things, even though Michael works for me.

Yeah. And he went to get permission to do that from the guy that was organizing things. Michael came up to me. He was like, like you, I work for you. Like if you're asking, like, what else am I going to say?

No, he's like, but the fact that Greg went and did that, right. Made such an impression on him. And, you know, it's something that Greg's always impressed upon me, but you actually have influenced our training as well.

And you, you've never known this. So I'm going to, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. And this book you most recently wrote, The Truth and True Crime, really actually it fits in well with it because when I was, when I train up new guys, one of the, one of the things I remember I, we had a guy we were training, he was a dentist by trade.

And I use your talks where you talk about training to show how we could take something where we are an expert. And even if it's from the secular world, your background is law enforcement. You're an expert in cold case for folks who, I guess you and I took for granted, like the knowledge of you, right.

But for folks who don't know your background, you're an LA detective, you, you were working cold cases. In fact, I think you were, if I'm not mistaken, you were on Dateline more than any other detective if I'm not mistaken.

Right. That's true. Only because I'm close to you, NBC Universal. That's the only reason. Yeah.

Right down the street from where we were working. So, yeah. I told my pastor last night that I was going to have you on. And I always joke with you because you've never lost a case, but that makes you have to admit that, well, yeah, because you're not going to bring a case when it's a cold case, not bring in a case unless, you know, it's solid.

It means it's kind of like when a DA says he prosecutes and wins 98 of his cases because he only files 40 of what we bring him. Well, yeah, we get it. So yeah, this is all the stuff that you have to really, and isn't it funny that we all, we all, you know, but that's what you're right.

We started, we have a profession and we bring that with us the same way we bring our upbringing with us, everything that we bring with us to this project and we want to be able to leverage that.

Yeah. And you, you use your background. I still love the, and this is the one I use to train people is the one where you come in with your flap jacket and you're explaining, you know, you explain the difference of teaching and training.

Like, look, you're training cause you're going to, you know, you, you put this jacket on, you train with it. So, you know, and you use the visual aids, you use the backgrounds, you use what you know in law enforcement.

And it's funny because this gentleman who is a dentist, he goes, he looks at, and he's, so we're trying to say, I said, look, this is something you should use your background, use your expertise, bring that into your talks.

Cause a lot of back then when he was first starting, a lot of his talks were because he was in the creation realm. A lot of his talks were really very similar to what Answers in Genesis says. Sure. I said, make it different.

I said, here's what you make, make it you. And it was funny cause this comment goes, yeah, but law enforcement's really cool.

Pulling people's teeth is not, well, but you know, what's great about the dentistry side of this is that all of us fear and dread something about going to the dentist. And so there's an aspect of a fear and awe that you can leverage, right?

You can leverage this, like, you know, so I talk about the things that would be appropriate for me to talk about in this realm. There's lots of stuff I'd like to talk about, but I don't talk about it because I don't, why would you care what I think about it?

You know, I don't have any trusted authority in that area. So you just shut up. You know, you just, those are things that I don't typically, you know, some of the stuff in science is I can, I wrote a book called God's Crime Scene where I looked at a lot of the scientific evidence, but I can't look at it as a scientist.

I'm not a scientist. I have to look at it as an investigator. Now look, in our job, here's what we do. We bring in scientists to testify all the time and so does the defense. And so I think I've got a sense of what we can, I can put in front of a jury that's trustworthy.

And so I have to leverage that sense, not, I don't have the background in it, but the great thing about, and that's what he'll have to do, like he'll have to talk about those things that he learned uniquely because, you know, every dentist goes to med school.

I don't even think people realize that, you know, my son's a doctor. He's an anesthesiologist, pediatric anesthesiologist. I have two boys. One's a cop and one's a doctor. And the doctor, you know, he's in med school at USC, well, that's a med school.

There's a, dentists go to the same medical school. So if you learn a certain sense of biology or some of the relationships between the sciences and biology, and you're a dentist, you probably learned the same thing my son did.

That gives you some, at least footing, some place to begin. But you know, that's one of the reasons why, Andrew, I didn't, I, the stuff I want, look, I ended up writing originally about the case for Christianity because I dumbed into it.

I was with, I was working as a detective. I had three active cases in trial. I was with Sean McDowell on a, a trip to Berkeley. And I was a part-time youth pastor for many years when my kids were in high school.

My kids are now in their thirties, but when they were in high school, I was their youth pastor. So, okay. During that time we would take immersive trips with Brett Kunkel and the Maven group, maventruth .com, shameless plug for Brett and his ministry, it's a great ministry.

So we would take these immersive trips and we would take theological trips, we would take philosophical trips, dealing with atheism. And we would, those second trips we would take to university campuses, but we picked Berkeley because it was the most hostile campus in the UC system, and we happen to be in the UC system here.

So that's where we would go. And I was with Sean McDowell one day and we were doing it with his high school group. He was a high school teacher at the time. And I was training his kids with the stuff on reliability of the scripture, the stuff I've been training high schoolers with since the beginning of my, basically just retracing my investigation when I first became a Christian.

He saw it and he said, you sure write a book about this? I'll tell you right now, that probably would not have been the first book I would have written. But it was the book that Sean said I should write, because he had seen these visual presentations on the screen, and that became Cold Case Christianity.

Well that just launches your publisher into thinking, well this is the Cold Case Christianity guy. So now, then I wrote two more books in that trilogy of books for Cook, David C. Cook Publishing, and that was Cold Case Christianity, God's Crime Scene, and Forensic Faith.

These are just the areas that I could empty out. But the book I wanted to write, the one I thought that really matters is where, is not just what is the evidence for a Christian, because I had already been beyond that for years.

But I wanted to talk about how Christianity describes the world the way it really is. It describes us the way we really are. And you will notice things, if you're an atheist and detective, you're going to see the same repeating human patterns over and over and over and over again.

And you may not even ground them in anything beyond the most recent secular studies that have been done that confirm these patterns. But it turns out, all these patterns are very ancient. If you wanted to flourish as a human, you could either dig into all the studies that have been done on human flourishing, realizing that some of them have biases and some don't.

Or you could simply read the Old and New Testament. You'll find that all of these suggestions for how to flourish as a human are very ancient. So I wanted to write that book forever, and I could never get anybody to bite.

So I left David C. Cook and I came over to Zondervan, largely because Lee Strobel said you should come over to Zondervan. I thought, okay. So I'm at Zondervan, and I pitched this book as the first book, because this is what I wanted to write all along.

And they said, no, you know what? We'd like you to do something that's more along the line of cold case Christianity, because we don't have cold case Christianity over here. That's not our book. And I thought, okay, well, there's a couple of aspects of that initial investigation years ago that I had done that I had never really written about.

For example, I could have written a lot about the non-canonical gospels, because I went through all of those in detail when I was first looking at Christianity. I've never written really much about that except on my website.

Long story short, I wrote Person of Interest for Zondervan, which I always wanted to write anyway. But I said, I'll only write Person of Interest if I can twist it toward not, here's the evidence for Christianity.

Of course, there's evidence for Christianity in there, but really, why does the Bible still matter in a world that rejects the Bible? Why does Jesus still matter? So I wanted to talk about why he matters.

So they let me do that, and then they owed me one, and this is the one that I finally got to write. And this is, to me, my favorite book by far. It's not even close. And I think it's from a perspective of what matters to most Christians in the Church.

This is the stuff that matters to them. This is the stuff that matters to all of us as Christians. This is where the rubber meets the road. This is where you're suffering, or whatever experience you're having in your marriage, whatever it is.

Because most people who call me, Andrew, do not call me to ask me about the details of the cosmological argument. They call me because they're having trouble in a relationship with a neighbor at work.

They're concerned about something going sideways, and they want to know, have you ever seen this before? Do you think this is going in the wrong direction? Do you think something terrible is waiting for me?

Do you think this is the first domino in a series of dominoes that's going to lead to something tragic? Based on what you've seen, and all the cases that work are tragic. I'm working when the final domino falls.

That's when I get involved. But we have to examine every domino that fell before that. So the question is, and that's what people call me. And this is the book that I think that, here's what I've discovered.

If you're writing Christian apologetics books, the first thing you have to convince your audience of is that they should be interested in Christian apologetics. What that means is a whole level of having to, that's why this is a very niche-y kind, but if you're writing books about how to live successfully and flourish as a Christian, you don't need to convince anybody that that's important.

In terms of that, we're so selfish and self-focused that all of us think that stuff matters to begin with. But I think that the case for Christianity is embedded in there. It is there, but most people are not going to come to it out of their sudden interest in the cosmological, teleological, ontological arguments, they're not going to come to it that way.

They're going to come to it because, wow, life just punched me in the face, and I'm not sure what to do about it. Does Christianity have anything to say about this? That's usually the entry point for most people.

Especially after a thing, I don't know if you heard about this out in California, maybe you didn't, this thing called COVID, did you ever hear about that? I don't know, maybe.

I think, well, listen, you're not in a state that's that much. Probably, well, your state's the...

I moved to Pennsylvania, so during COVID...

Even Pennsylvania, right, but even Pennsylvania, you've got the east side, which is obviously the urban more, and then you have the west side.

I'm north of Philly, so yeah, I still have some... It's not as bad as that communist country known as New Jersey, but it's close enough.

And I think the same is probably true for California, right? So I'm in Southern California, and I think if you took Los Angeles and Marin, if you took LA and San Francisco out of, in the counties in which they reside, out of the state, you'd find that the state itself is very different.

Well, that's the whole country.

You take the cities, I mean, the Democrats only focus on the cities where they just completely destroy them, and then they go, oh, it's everyone else's fault.

Well, and what's interesting is if you look at the studies on this, people are far more likely to be secular, to hold a secular worldview if the closer they live to a major urban area, that's number one, the closer they live to a coast, that's number two, and the closer they live to a university, that's number three.

So if you happen to be in a city that's close to the coast that contains major universities, well, good luck to you, because that's what's going to, and I'm in Los Angeles where you're right on the coast, and we have more universities, more top level universities, medical schools and things like that in California than I think every other state, any other state rather, and so I think that that's something that, that's why we are, that's the tail that's wagging the dog right now, and so that's why I really always wanted to write a book, because it turns out that, so look, this is a weird book.

This is a book that's 15 true crime stories, 15 rules for life, 15 pieces of evidence that Christianity describes us the way that we really are, so that's the hybrid, and so I find it trending in these, you know, self-help, I find it trending in apologetics, and I find it trending in true crime, so that's fine, so it's a little bit difficult to get your hands around, but here's what it is.

It basically is, you've probably experienced some of this stuff, and when you read these crime stories, I think they will help you help the reader to, they're helping me, because even as I, like, here's the thing about it.

These are 15 attributes of human flourishing. If you'll simply embrace these 15 things, you will flourish according to all of the current sociological studies, and I've included them, and according to the pages of the New Testament, and I've included that, so you will flourish if you simply follow these 15 rules for life, but I think that part of it is that we don't, I don't know that we fully understand yet, I mean, when I talk, when I describe some of these, they're surprising, that if I said, hey, you know, this is one thing you could do that would change your life, I think they're surprising, and some of these are pretty controversial, but they at least are now the things that I've always wanted, like, I was like you, I pastored right before I wrote Cold Case, I was a pastor for five years here.

I had a church that I planned with the Southern Baptist Convention, and loved it, and then I couldn't do everything. I couldn't spend, you know, I couldn't be a full-time detective and write books, travel and speak, and lead a church, so I had to step out of something, but this is the stuff I was talking about with my congregation constantly, you know, I wasn't really talking about the other stuff, and I guarantee you, when you have a conversation about the gospel with somebody, that you're more likely to enter it through one of these 15 topics than I was ever going to enter it through any of the topics in all the other books.

I mean, we're going to enter it probably through, man, I can't believe this is happening in my marriage. Oh, really? What's happening in your marriage? Well, it turns out that the Christian worldview has a lot to say about this, and maybe now you're open to it, and there's evidence that Christianity is actually true, even though the culture is teaching us just the opposite about marriage, and that's why we're struggling, because we've embraced what the culture is teaching rather than what we see is on the pages of Scripture.

So that's the cost of this book. So you look at the, and I'm not, I don't follow sports so much, but there's a football player, a Catholic football player at a Catholic university speaking a Catholic message of family, right?

And people stood because he's, you know, he basically is saying the highest value for his wife was to be a mother, and people are like, oh, you're degrading women. By what? By lifting her up? But the fact that there's been kind of a backlash in favor of him has been interesting, because what I think is happening is the culture has tried to go so far against God, removing God from everything, that there's this void, and they've been trying to fill it with everything but God, and people are starting to realize, no, the only thing that answers for the purpose of life is God.

We were created to glorify God.

Marriage, Proximity, and Why the Culture Misreads Vocation

Yeah, that's so interesting, because, you know, this guy's Butker is his name, and he's a kicker for Kansas City Chiefs, and this is a guy who really has set more records in the last year. He was 11 for 11 in the playoffs.

This guy's an essential part of this team, okay? So now the question will be, what's the team going to do with this guy? Since he's, now, I think if you were to go back and look at his, he did a speech at a Catholic university, and in that speech, he advocated for Catholic doctrinal principles.

Nothing controversial. If you're a card-carrying Catholic, you're not going to think anything's controversial at all.

And he didn't speak against LGBT or any of that. He just lifted up and praised.

Well, there was a part in that, there was a moment where he said that, hey, the culture is selling you a bill of goods. So in a sense, he is coming against what the culture is teaching. But here's what I think was interesting.

He used the word vocation the way that a Catholic would use the word vocation. I think if he would have said that you get meaning out of, or, because that's tied into the word vocation. This is your calling.

This is your, but I think we hear the word vocation like your job. So you're attacking the fact that women have jobs? No, he's not. No, he's using the word vocation in a different way. He's using it in a very Catholic way.

And as a calling, as a mission, as where the place where you're going to find your fulfillment as the, and I think if we had to use those words instead of the word vocation, he might have, but I don't think it, but look, in the end, he is talking about a conservative view of Christian, of marriage that is really biblical in the sense that, and so there's a chapter in this book.

Here's what I've noticed. I've included a crime story and so many of my, sadly, if you watch Dateline, you'll see that it's probably 70 spousal murder because that's, you know, there's a, so I'm going to kind of blend two chapters of this book.

It turns out that it's our, our friendships, it's our, our social connections, including our love connections that end up killing us most of the time. And so when detectives get to a crime scene, we, we have, I call it the proximity principle and it's, I talk about it in one chapter of this book, what we're doing is we're looking and saying like, who's in close proximity to this victim?

Because it turns out that most of us, when we are killed, not everyone, but most of us, when we are killed, we have either inadvertently, we've let this killer too close to us, we've embraced the killer in some aspect of our life, we're married to him, or, you know, we are sleeping with him, we are, we have allowed this killer into our lives, and that doesn't mean I'm victim blaming, I'm simply saying this is how we unpack and how we unpuzzle a murder.

We come in and we say, okay, so who's in the bullseye of this person's proximity? Who is his closest, and I'm looking for relationships. So if I'm looking at first, it's going to be relational proximity.

So who are they married to? Who are they sleeping with? Who are their best friends? Who are their friends of any kind? Going out in concentric circles, who are they working with? Who is in their body of friends, who knows them, or maybe, you know, they tipped off something, who knows?

And if I run out of all relational proximity, I now move to geographic proximity. Well, who are their roommates? Who are they, who's living next door? Now, if you run dry on all of those, you have no relational proximity that's pointing to a suspect, and you've got no geographic proximity pointing to a suspect, well, now you're in a real true whodunit.

I have one of those, because a little girl, it's the first cold case I ever reopened, and I did it years before I was even working in homicide. I was working as an undercover detective, and a case my dad had worked involved a 10-year-old girl.

And they looked, listen, we had over 400 lead cards back in those days, they used to put them on index cards, 1972, so they used to put them on an index card, over 400 index cards with leads on this little girl's death, and it turned out not a single name that was ever investigated had anything to do with her murder, because it wasn't about relational proximity, and it wasn't about geographic proximity, it was about some nutjob who was just driving through town, didn't know the girl, but saw her, and snatched her off the street.

And those take, that case was, it occurred in 72, I think I first started looking at it in the mid -90s, and it didn't get solved until 2019. So why? Because there was no proximity. That proximity principle matters.

Well, when it comes to marriage, I mean, so many of the cases that I'm working are marriages where you're going, okay, that's everything we shouldn't do in a marriage. That pretty much is what happened in that marriage, and now I'm working the case.

So it teaches you something about marriage, at least it's cautionary tales. All these chapters are cautionary tales. So there is a chapter in here on marriage. I'll tell you, I think it's one of the more controversial chapters I've written in this book, because I think that the culture, even the Christian culture, is delaying marriage.

And when you delay marriage, you end up probably saying it's not as important. If it was important to you, you would have done it when you were 19. But you thought there were other things that were more important that you did at 19.

And now you're 30, and you're single, and you're reading a chapter on marriage, and you're probably thinking that Jim Wallace is single-shaming you. No, that's not it. But I'll tell you that if you look at the trajectory of where marriage sends us in all the studies, unless you're bumping up against a study, which is now in the last 10 years, I'm starting to see studies that are making a conscious effort to subvert marriage, right?

Any form of life is good enough, really. The data is pretty strong. If you are married, you're going to flourish from a health perspective, mental health and physical health, at a much higher level than single people.

Your income, every way that we measure flourishing, and your kids especially, because it turns out that kids raised by two biological parents in a low-conflict setting flourish. Now, I know that's controversial to say, because a lot of us don't raise our kids that way.

We've got blended families. I also have a blended family. For example, I was not raised by two parents in a low-conflict setting. I was raised by one. My parents divorced when I was three. My mom never remarried.