Relationships - A PeppTalk Podcast

About Relationships - A PeppTalk Podcast

Welcome to Pepptalk - Pepperdine University’s podcast dedicated to sparking conversations of personal and global significance, featuring world-renowned professors, faculty, and students from across the University. pepperdineuniversity.substack.com (https://pepperdineuniversity.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Pepperdine University

Category

arts · education

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

11 May 2025

Latest episode

12 Jun 2026

Latest episodes

29 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   12 Jun 2026

   Can Beauty Save the World?

   In this episode of PeppTalk, host Coby Dolloff (https://substack.com/profile/130533022-coby-dolloff) sits down with Josh Nadeau (https://substack.com/profile/107386864-josh-nadeau), author, artist, and one of Substack's most compelling voices on faith and culture, for a conversation on beauty, embodiment, and what it takes to become whole. Josh is the creator of Sword and Pencil, a platform where he shares his iconography-influenced art and writing, and the author of multiple books, including Room for Good Things to Run Wild: How Ordinary People Become Everyday Saints (https://www.amazon.com/Room-Good-Things-Run-Wild/dp/1400341043).In this conversation, you'll hear why beauty is the most powerful apologetic for a data-obsessed world, how the Great Books told Josh the truth about where he was, and what it actually means to live in your body as a spiritual practice.If you're in the dark wood right now, or beginning to wonder if there's more to the spiritual life than memorizing the right platitudes, this episode is for you. Transcript: Coby Dolloff: Hey everybody, welcome back to PeppTalk. It’s good to have you with us. We’re here where we bring the conversations that happen on campus to you, our listeners. I’m Coby, your host — sad Alexa is not with us today — but I’ve got a very special guest to introduce you to, a good friend of mine, Josh Nadeau. Josh, it’s good to have you. I’ll give you a formal bio here in a second. Josh Nadeau: Yeah, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Also, you didn’t tell me the name of the podcast. Coby: PeppTalk. Josh: PeppTalk! Coby: Yeah. Do you like that? Josh: I do like it. Decent. Coby: Yeah — I mean, we thought about the name for a while, and it was back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and one day we were like, “PeppTalk.” Nice little pun. We were like, that’s it. Josh: I love a little pun. Very sweet. Coby: So — I always tell Alexa, we always fight about this. You can answer this for us; this is our most important first question. Obviously, formally on Spotify or whatever, it’s the PeppTalk Podcast. But if you’re talking about it, then is it “PeppTalk” or is it “the PeppTalk”? Josh: Oh, you guys just do “PeppTalk.” It’s just “PeppTalk.” Coby: Thank you. Alexa, if you’re out there! Josh: ‘Cause, like, you can’t be like, “Hey, we’re gonna go have the PeppTalk.” That sounds like it’s about to get serious. That’s like English as a second language — “Can I please have the breakfast?” You can cut that if you’re not allowed to put that in. That’s like how I speak Spanish. “Hey, where are the friends of mine?” Coby: Just breakfast — we’re just about to have breakfast. We’re just gonna have the PeppTalk. Josh: Yeah, we’re just gonna have the breakfast meal — the PeppTalk Podcast. Coby: Anyway — so here’s Josh. Josh, if you don’t know him, has a large Instagram following through an account called Sword and Pencil — puts out a lot of great art, iconography. I’ll let you talk a little bit more about your work here in a second. But he’s an artist; he’s also a writer — multiple books, including a book that was really impactful for me. It’s called Room for Good Things to Run Wild: How Ordinary People Become Everyday Saints, which I’ll talk about some more in a bit. But Josh is on campus here at Pepperdine for an event we’re putting on in collaboration with our friends at the Society for Classical Learning. Our Great Books people, the K-through-12 classical learning people, are all here thinking about: how can we educate students in a way that they learn to love the true, the good, and the beautiful, and how can we have what happens in the classroom actually inform character rather than just minds? And so — a lot of people who believe in a lot of good things. It’s been a fun week. So Josh, I’ll quit yapping here. I want to just first start with your work. Can you tell us a little bit about what you do design-wise? We’ll link some of your art in the episode, but what kind of art are you doing? What’s it influenced by? How did you kind of come to do that? And then I’d love to talk about the book after that. Josh: I mean, well, first off, it’s cool what you guys are doing with the summit, because that’s the big thing for me — how do you translate transcendental things into a way that someone can live? Right? Like, all things just developed in the sense of: you cultivate it, you figure out what you like doing and what resonates with you and other people. So my art, as it stands now, is some mishmash, stylistically, of iconography and traditional tattoo and comic books — very folky. Coby: Cool. Josh: And for the reason of — I view beauty as an apologetic. You know this. Just like people are wrestling through the big ideas — what is truth, what is going on — I think beauty gets to do the same thing. We get to use beauty as an apologetic, and as Christians, I believe we have the most beautiful story to tell. Coby: Can you talk for a second — if people aren’t familiar, when you say beauty is an apologetic, what is it? How’s beauty gonna save the world, buddy? What does this mean? Josh: Totally, yeah. So, the idea of beauty saving the world — generally, my take on how the world has gone, and you don’t need to agree with me, this is just how I view life: as we moved into the modernist and postmodern world, everything just became idea-driven. So you have the modernist views of, like, scientists — the only things that exist and the only things that matter are things you can touch and see and measure. And then that’s where you have the rise of all these psychos who are like, “Oh yeah, there could be no God, because we can’t put him in a beaker.” Be like, “Oh, true — so smart, man.” So I did my undergrad in physics, and this is one of the big things you bump into all the time: how do we move from what is physical and seen to what is metaphysical and unseen? Coby: Yeah — because measuring something does not take away the mystery. Josh: Totally. It doesn’t explain why. So Richard Feynman has this — he’s a physicist; he’s, like, the GOAT physicist. And he has this thing where he became friends with an artist, and the artist was teaching him how to paint, and he would teach this artist physics and math and stuff. Coby: Cool. Josh: And they had this amazing conversation, where the artist one day was like, “Listen — you see the world in one way; I see the world in a different way. I appreciate art and beauty in a way that you don’t.” And Richard Feynman said an amazing — he was like, “That’s not true. You look at the flower and you see color and composition and all of these things. I look at the flower and I see the design of it. I know how the carbon and the oxygen molecules are separating,” and whatever. So those things are very true — you can still look at life poetically. But in that world of these people who think data will save you — and that gets into the church all the time here — “Think! Memorize these eight definitions, and now you’re not addicted to any of your vices. No, you’re good.” All of those people still go and consume movies and books and music, and they wanna go to the beach and watch the sunset. Beauty is doing something for them that is immeasurable. Coby: Even if they’re not clocking it. Josh: Exactly. Even if they don’t know what’s going on, something is doing work on them. And in the tradition — the Christian tradition — we believe in goodness, truth, and beauty, the transcendentals. God is the source of those things. There’s the ontological reality of those, in that hierarchy. And so that is essentially just a stupid, nerdy way of saying that being leads to truth, leads to virtue, leads to beauty. But there’s a psychological way of experiencing them, which is: we always experience the beauty of a thing first. Right? Like, when I saw my now-wife, I wasn’t like, “Wow, she’s such a true person.” I was like, “Whoa — super pretty. I’m in.” And so I think that’s the apologetic for our modern time, at least for a certain scope of people. So my art is doing it — it’s rooted in truth and it’s rooted in virtue, but I wanna present that as beautifully as possible. And I want it to be this open invitation that does work on someone before their brains and rationality can dismiss it as, say, Christian. Coby: Yeah, because you can’t argue with it. Right — I remember I visited the Vatican as a senior in high school. And at that point I was still just kind of a jock, figuring things out. I wasn’t talking about the transcendentals. I wasn’t reading. And I went over and looked at Michelangelo’s Pietà and I just started weeping, and I didn’t know what was happening to me. I didn’t have the terms; I didn’t know why I was being affected in this way. I was being pierced by beauty, right? I was being pierced by something that went — like, the intellect was still knocking at the front door, and beauty had gone in through the window. Josh: Yeah — and it’s an amazing thing. Those things drown you. Beauty drowns you. And then the best thing about beauty is it drowns you to life. You feel like you can breathe for the first time. So you have this moment where you’re like, “Maybe I was drowning for the rest of my life — and now I saw the Pietà, and I’m like, oh, I can breathe again.” And so — I am not at that level, obviously. Coby: Hey, we’re getting there. Josh: Yeah. But I think one of the important things with my art — what I love to do is be invitational, be open. I love the richness of symbolism. So, I’m Eastern Orthodox, and in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, iconography is a deeply layered, rich, symbolic way of viewing reality properly. So, for example, Jesus will always be wearing the same two colors — you have the blue and you have the red, and one represents his divinity and will be cloaked over by his humanity. So that’s doing a theological telling, symbolically. And I love that. So that’s what informs a lot of my art — I love symbolic theological storytelling that gets into people’s hearts before their brains, like you said, can argue against it, can push against it. And I like it being a bit cryptic. I don’t like things being on the nose. So there are some times, like, I will draw a Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday — I’ll draw the cross and the resurrection. Wonder what that means. But I do love the idea of trying to take the things that we’re so used to seeing, or ideas we’re so used to hearing, and then reinterpreting them for people to see them or hear them as for the first time. That’s what art should be doing — giving you new eyes to see old things, familiar things. Coby: So good. And so, as you’re doing visual art — is this something you’ve always done? Josh: Yeah, like, I’ve always drawn and stuff. Coby: And writing — does this come along later? Josh: Yeah, I did both. You know, as a kid, I wrote stories and drew pictures for them. I would be in class drawing pictures. I’ve always loved writing. And, you know, I grew up in the time where writing and drawing were never career paths to choose. So it is weird to be, like, officially a writer and a drawer — an illustrator, whatever. Coby: Yeah, you beat the system, dude. Josh: Totally. And I’m very humbled by it. I’ve told you this off camera — I’ve mentioned it two million times. I don’t take any of it for granted. I do realize I’m living in a very unique and blessed space. And it’s one of the reasons why I care so much. These are the things for me — “to whom much is given, much will be required.” Be like, “Listen, not many people in the modern world get to make it as writers and artists. And so if that’s happening, Josh, what is your responsibility?” And so there’s all these things where — we were talking about this earlier today — I can never be the hero. I’m not the guy. So, I know you like Gatsby — I know you love Fitzgerald. I love Fitzgerald, and I love The Great Gatsby — his apostolic fiction. I know I’ve told you the story before, but that resonates with me: Nick telling Jay’s story is like me telling Jesus’ story. I’m not the main guy. Coby: It’s like John the Baptist. Josh: John, exactly. And so the writing — those things just were never viable paths, but they’re always things I did. And then, you know, I just got really lucky. I won the lottery with those things — very providential. So I wrote a few things for some publications, and then a publishing house had read some of them, and they’re like, “Hey, do you wanna write books?” Coby: That’s awesome. Josh: Be like, “Yeah, that’s the dream.” And I didn’t even know I could do that. So yeah — not a conventional thing. People would be like, “How do you get into the biz?” And I’d be like, “I don’t know, man.” Coby: You just start drawing. Josh: Yeah, just draw pictures on envelopes. Coby: Dude, but that’s the mystery of vocation and calling, too. And I think it’s cool how you do take it seriously — yeah, there’s a lot of people who would wanna do this. I think a lot of times they don’t realize the challenges that come as well. And the responsibility. Josh: Kurt Vonnegut talks about those things. And it sounds bougie in one sense, but he’s like, it’s hard to be a writer. You have to be hunched over at a desk, ‘cause your body decays and works against you, and you’re battling over, like, seven words, and you’ll do it all day, and then you wake up and you’re like, “My shoulders are hunched and my hips are crazy, and I smoke and drink all the time.” Like — that’s him, not me. I would never. And I think that with every job there’s the grind; with every job there’s the thing that — yes, it is very fun drawing pictures and writing sentences for a living. But when you realize that all of life is a receiving and a giving back, then the hard work is to take the things that God has given me or shown me or revealed to me, or the life that I’m living, and say, “How do I give this to others as gift?” Coby: ‘Cause it actually was always just received. Josh: Totally. And then what you have to do — as an artist and as a writer, if people are interested in this — you have to learn to live a thousand lives all at once. People are going to interact with life differently, and you have to see life the way they see life. And so you have to feel the things they feel in order to offer them something that will make sense. And so there’ll be moments where — I’m a very happy-go-lucky guy, very positive — and then there’ll just be seasons where I’m processing something for someone else and living in their despair. Coby: ‘Cause you have to. Yeah — if it’s gonna resonate, if it’s not everyone’s story, it’s not gonna work. Josh: Totally. Coby: So tell us about your books, then. You can preview the one that’s coming out, right? I would love if you did a little bit — maybe you’re not allowed to; that’s up to you. But tell us about Room for Good Things to Run Wild. Josh: So, Room for Good Things to Run Wild — that’s my first book. How Ordinary People Become Everyday Saints. The idea with the book is — I’m a big show-not-tell. So I have this working assumption that most people in our churches and in the world are just not doing well. And take the church in particular: I think sermons and small groups and self-help and all the things for flourishing are aimed at two kinds of people — the people who are, like, the eight or nine or ten out of ten, everything’s going good, or the people who are gonna bottom out. I think the silent majority of people are just not doing okay — physically or spiritually or emotionally — but they can’t say anything. ‘Cause you have two or three options, right? So say you’re not being able to integrate your life — your faith, the Jesus life, is not coming through like the promises. “Hey, you will receive life to the fullest.” You’ll be like, “Sorry — it doesn’t feel that way, buddy. I don’t think so.” If you say that for so long and there’s no change, then you’re not in anymore. So you have to choose either to acquiesce and be like, “Yep, don’t worry, guys — I did actually let go and let God take over,” or you’d be like, “Sorry, I’m out of here.” So for me — I was in seminary, I was taking my master’s, I was working at a bank as, like, a project manager — like a little business tycoon, young guy, up-and-comer. And I was an alcoholic, and I was suicidal. And so the book — what it does is it follows my story from the depths into finding a new way of living life, because the way that I was taught and experienced Christianity was, like we’ve said a little bit, very intellectual, data-driven — and it wasn’t transforming me. So what I wanted to do with Room for Good Things is to show people — it does matter, your first step. The first step really does matter. And so to develop a new perspective of life: life as gift, experiencing God through beauty, re-enchanting the world, realizing that every moment of your life is an invitation into the divine, participating in the divine love. And I believe people are not reasoned out of something they were never reasoned into. And so I think a lot of people just love certain things and have their hearts aimed at certain things — even if they’re coping mechanisms. And so there’s a reason why people will read these books on spiritual formation or spiritual practices, and it works for a week or two — it depends on their discipline — and then it goes away: because they’ve never fallen in love. And like, listen — my undergrad’s in physics. I never fell in love with the Creator or creation by reading an experimental or scientific document. Coby: Even though you knew so much about it. Josh: Right. What made me fall in love was watching the sun rise and set and being like, “Whoa.” I can talk about the journey of the sun — that’s cool. And so what I wanted to do is write a book that was aimed at people’s hearts. So, use my story as a gateway into the every-story, as a gateway into the capital-G, capital-S Great Story — the Christ story — and then bring people through. This is the one thing — there are ways to show the truth and not tell the truth. And I don’t mind telling — these are tricks of the trade: you, the writer, are wanting the reader to come to the conclusions before you say them, because then we own it and we get invested. And so some of the problem with trying to develop a whole new way of being is: what does it feel like to erase my old one — and am I crazy for wanting to do that? Is it bad for me to say, “Hey, you know what, maybe I need to put the theology books down for a little bit, and I need to look at a pine cone for an afternoon”? Coby: Just discerning the divine nature through his creation. Josh: Yeah. And so, how to then say: does my entire spiritual walk transcend just things I know about God? Do I know God — and how can I know God? And so I wanted to walk people through that meandering journey. And so, for example — like I was telling you earlier, I love negative reviews on my books. There’s a lot of good ones, which I’m very thankful for, but the negative ones are always very telling, because sometimes they’re showing their hand more than they realize. They’ll be like, “Well, this book — he was an alcoholic, and then he talked about drinking down the road.” And I was like — he had to. You don’t just stop. Coby: And so to teach people it’s not just clear-cut. Josh: Totally. Your trajectory up into life is not a straight shot. And thank God that he’s so merciful to keep incarnating and condescending down to us, to meet us where we are. So that’s what Room for Good Things is — to take someone from, hopefully, the depths of whatever their coping mechanisms are, and to just introduce them into a new framework: beauty leading you into virtue, leading you into truth, leading you into being. Coby: Yeah, so good. So as you lay that out — I mean, obviously, I would say, go read the book. But from sort of a preview — when I read your book, immediately I was like, “Dante. This is Dante,” right? And I love — for our great books people out there — there are so many self-help books out here that are like, “Oh, here’s how you don’t get yourself into a mess,” right? “Here’s how you don’t go off the road, and always stay between the guardrails, and life will always be perfect — you’ll be healthy, wealthy, and wise.” And it’s like — that’s not life, dude. And so what I think is so great about the great books, Dante in particular, right, is it starts off — first lines of the thing — “Midway upon the path of this our mortal life, I found myself in a dark wood astray, for the straightforward path had been lost.” It’s like — I don’t know how the heck I got here. I’m here. I’m in a dark wood. There’s predators all around. I don’t know which way to go. Now what? And so it skips the self-help guardrail advice and goes: we’re all gonna be here at some point. Where it’s like, “Man, I’m putting whiskey in my coffee in the morning,” or “I’m depressed,” or “I just got cheated on” — or “I cheated on my—” and it’s like, where do I go from here? And so, all that to say — for these people who are like, “Man, I actually do believe that Christianity is true, and I see some sort of a beauty here, but I’ve just kind of heard platitudes all my life, and it’s not working for me” — what are kind of the beginning steps that you took, and that you would have other people begin to take? Josh: Yeah — I love that you say that, because I’m very fascinated — I just have this idea: why aren’t we telling the truth? Not, like, capital-T Truth — just, why aren’t we telling the truth that every single one of us is gonna be in the abyss and have to be like, “Well, which direction do I walk?” — because there’s no North Star down there. And that is the question. And if people pretend that it’s just, “Here’s the guardrails, and here’s the thing, and you’re not actually gonna be there if you do these five things” — even if you do those five things, you will be there. It will be a health thing, it will be a tragedy, it will be anything, and it’s gonna put you into a place. So the book opens up, for me — why are you looking for the living among the dead? There’s no one here — no one alive, that is. And that’s me: I’m dead. And in the opening, I’m cascading down to rock bottom. There’s no up, there’s no down — and that’s life. And so for me, I think the first thing is — I wrote the intro to be as open and raw and vulnerable as possible, because the first step is just admitting: I am at rock bottom. At least, it’s as dark as it’s ever been. Let’s be real — just say it. You have to own it. And even if it’s the whisper you say inside your head, ‘cause you’re not brave enough to say it out loud, or pray it, or say it to anyone else — just get it out. And then — I don’t believe there are hard-and-fast rules into healing, as in, there’s no twelve-step program — as much as I love AA, and went before. These are directional things. So what we need to learn, I think, as a culture — this exists for us over in the East, and I know it does for you too — it’s directional and under guidance. So you always need guidance. You need a Beatrice, right? You always need a Beatrice. So I have a spiritual father, and we’re gonna go — there will be directional things that are going on, but people are gonna work with me. And so for my life, I didn’t have that — but what I did have was great books. And I had the life that I was living. And so, like — I grew up playing sports and doing martial arts, and I had read the great books, and be like: every one of my favorite stories — they’ve ended up in the pit, in the valley of shadow. And then they just marched forward. Like — The Odyssey‘s coming out, and I won’t say anything about what I think the new movie is gonna be — but reading The Odyssey and being like, “I have to get home.” It’d be like, “Me too, dude. I gotta get home, against every wave that comes my way.” And so for me, part of that was boxing — just to go to a place that was so physically demanding that I couldn’t be in my brain; I had to be in my body. And then having these epiphanies, to be like — well, how come my spirituality is not like that? How come I’m not putting myself, spiritually, in a situation where I can get out of my brain and start doing my Christian life in and through my body? So embodiment was a big thing. Guides were a big thing. Reading good books — but not reading them as knowledge acquisition; reading them as friends who love me, who are caring for me, who want the best for me. Like Chesterton — there are people who I will get to the other side with and be like, “Dude — thank you.” And so those things were really big for me. And then the other stuff is — you just take the next right step for you and your situation. So for me, I was an alcoholic and suicidal, and I was really depressed. So it’d be like, “How do I stop drinking? I don’t know — I’m addicted to it.” And then — and this is the difficulty — you’re gonna have false guides. And they’re not gonna be evil guides; they’re just going to be telling you the things that they need to be doing, or they’re gonna tell you the things that they’ve always done. And you’re like — well, if I keep doing that— Coby: The way it’s always been — I’m gonna be back here, but it would be worse. ‘Cause I’ll have tried and climbed up however much harder, and then when I’m higher and when I fall, I might crash right through rock bottom, harder. Josh: Yeah. So — I could go on. Coby: And so how do you know — how do you know the right guides? This is another interesting — this is the Dante thing again, right? He’s like, “I don’t know where I’m going.” Virgil shows up. He’s like, “Oh, I know this guy, ‘cause I’ve read the stuff. This is somebody I can listen to.” So how does that translate in real life? How do you go, “Oh, this is a Virgil” — versus, “This is a well-meaning person, but not a Beatrice”? Josh: Spoiler! Coby: Spoiler! Josh: To be fair, I don’t think people are gonna read all three. . . I think there’s a risk to it — there’s always an inherent risk. Even with a Virgil — you think there’s people you can trust, and again, no other spoilers, but there’s moments you’re like, “Can I trust them?” It’s a Frodo and Sam thing, you know what I mean? Can I trust all the way? So — the tradition has great people; we call them saints. You could read them — always highly recommend. But literature was big for me. And so there’s a lot of literature that I read that is not obviously, explicitly Christian, or anywhere close to being Christian — but the reason they’re great books is they do display the human condition. And I love narrative-driven things, because we’re all storied people. We’re all telling ourselves stories, we’re all living out stories — and to learn to tell yourself a new story, and begin to embody a new story, is phenomenal. So recognizing — seeing myself as Dorian Gray. And I was the poster boy — so this is the first chapter in the book — I was that guy, but I use my city and my space as the metaphor. So I lived in Toronto at the time, and I would go to work looking very slick — I had the pants, had the hair, the whole thing. And every city looks glamorous from the outside. And then I would go lock my bike up behind the office, and it’s all the homeless and the junkies and the forgotten and the unkempt, and they’re wasting away in the back alley. And you’d be like — that’s the whitewash, too. That’s me, right? I am Dorian, with the painting in the room. Coby: Yeah. Wow. Josh: And so that showed me sin more clearly than any sermon — so I had to learn to listen to Oscar Wilde, of all people. Coby: Yeah, dude. Josh: And so literature, if you let it, and if you learn to speak the language, it can do a thing to you. Like when Lewis is like, “My own eyes are not enough. I need the eyes of every person — I need to live every story.” And so that’s where, like, part of the impulse for my book came: if I tell you a story, and you can take your story and map it onto mine, then we can do this journey together. And so, yeah — the guides. I would say, honestly: read the lives of the saints. But other than that, read literature and take the risk. And what if there’s a book that seems to be guiding you poorly? Think about why. Think about why you don’t want to do that. Why isn’t this resonating with you? That’s how you discern your life. You have to own your life. Coby: It’s a step at a time. You’re the only one who can actually live it. Talk about the embodiment thing a little bit here, right? Because I think this is a thing that — a lot of young people in particular, I think there’s a movement towards this sort of thing of, “Oh, hey — yes, there are, like, the intellectual and emotional sides of my faith. Those are important things. But oh — I actually am not just a soul. I’m not a soul who happens to have a body that’s gonna be discarded.” So if you give us the 30,000-foot — a lot of your stuff, I think, comes down, practice-wise, to this idea of embodiment. What is that? What does it look like to practice it? What difference does it make? Josh: It totally does. Like, the big impulse of all my stuff — if you want the secret sauce, it’s always theosis. So you obtain life by being united to Christ, by participating in his life — and then everything is embodied. So you embody spiritual realities, and you get to spiritualize your embodied living. That’s everything. The way that I learned it — I can just share it more as a story, more narrative-driven. The way I learned it was recognizing — I would be at church... so, I was doing my master’s, and we’re learning about heresies, and learning about Gnosticism. So Gnosticism is this old-school heresy where people believe that the material world is bad and the invisible world is what’s good. So your body is this thing you need to be liberated from — it’s a prison, it’s a tomb — and whatever heaven is going to be is your liberation from it. And I remember — so I tell one of these stories in the book — I was doing my master’s, we’re writing some Old Testament paper, and the master’s students had a special section of the library where we could go — where the normies and the plebs... we could go and do the hard work, where they’re doing, like, Greek 101, and we’re trying to discern the universe. And it’s late at night — I was at a small seminary, so the librarian was like, “Hey, you guys lock up after yourselves. Here’s the key if you’re going to leave the building and come back. Just do whatever you want.” So I’m there with one other guy, and like — I’m starving, I’m working. And he leans over to me, and he says, like, “Josh, are you hungry? You want to go grab something?” And I was like, “Dude, yes — I gotta get out of this Hebrew and into, like, a different kind of brew.” And he goes to me — he’s like, “Oh, dude, I’m just feasting on this passage. You can go.” And I was like — what are you doing? Coby: You’re like, “Dog, I need some food.” Josh: Yeah — like, you asked me if I was hungry just to tell me you’re consuming food I know nothing of? Oh, wow — how Christlike of you. This mere mortal requires beef.” Coby: Yeah — “what a loser you must be.” Josh: Yeah, right. And so — but that is this thing that we tend to think, which is — you needing to be hungry, your body longing for something, without being able to discern what that means. Like, I now think of every meal I have as an Edenic meal. I must consume life lest I die. I must consume the gift from God and receive life. So every meal I have is, in some way, Eucharistic. But I had to learn that. So, watching that happen — and I remember going... I smoked a lot at the time, so I get out of the seminary and I’m smoking a cigarette and I’m walking across the street, and I’m like, “That guy’s a loser.” But why is he a loser? Like, what is the thing that is just not sitting well with me? It’s not that he’s piety-signaling. It’s that his only language for discussing truth and reality and joy is disembodied. And then learning to be like — when I went and had that meal, because I was starving, something happened in my body, and I was like, “How come I haven’t been able to put these two things together?” So, to make it really intellectual before we get into the embodied piece: I think, generally, the modern evangelical church is functionally Gnostic. If you have a problem, if you have a joy — it’s probably not an embodied joy. You probably shouldn’t talk about how great sex is, or how good wine is, or how good sleeping in is, or working hard and cracking a beer open — or your drink of choice — at the end of the day. That’s a bit weird. Like, you should probably just be talking about prayer and evangelism. “Oh, you have a problem? Memorize these theological truths.” Coby: Yeah — “Here’s your intellectual solution.” Josh: “Here — take two platitudes, call me in the morning, see how you’re feeling.” And so the idea that our bodies were just this vehicle that carried our brains and souls around stopped sitting well with me — but I had no clue where to look. Like, how do I solve this problem? So, embodiment is essentially — and this is a huge theme in the book, so it gets much more developed — but the idea is that you are an incarnated soul, and there is no hard-and-fast line between your body and your soul. You are your body; you are your soul. If you remove the soul from a person, you have a machine — you have a corpse. If you just have a soul on its own, it’s a ghost. And if you just put those two things together without Christ, without the third thing — grace — you just have a ghost in the machine. And so the whole embodied thing is to be like — listen: Christ — so, in the East, we always believe Christ was going to become incarnate, because that’s how you can reveal the full overlap of heaven and earth, right? Of visible and invisible. So humans are microcosms — we’re a microcosm of the entire cosmos. We are material — like, we’re visible and invisible. We’re a mixture of heaven and earth. And as Christians, we’re a mixture of the divine life — immortality and mortality, right? We have the Spirit living within us, reconstituting us. And so, learning then to say: okay, I have a body. It was intended to be given to me. So there’s a section in the book — I quote Saint Athanasius, where he talks about Christ entering the body and glorifying the body and revealing what the body was always intended to be, which is an icon — an image of God. So just like Christ revealed, “If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father,” we should be able to say, “If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father.” And so then to be like — well, if Christ is doing the revelatory, sacramental work — your body reveals your soul, reveals who you are. And he didn’t disparage the body. And he grew in wisdom and stature before man — Luke 2. To be like — how come I’m not doing the same? Am I better than my Messiah? “Oh, you need the body? I don’t, dude.” Coby: “Yeah, I’m actually good with just the soul.” Josh: Yeah, right. “I’m going to go to the top of the mountain, and I’m going to nirvana myself into, like, perfection.” I know nirvana is perfection — but I can’t say I’m going to Buddhist myself into perfection; it’s just not a good roll off the tongue. And so then, to start the step-by-step process of learning to be in your body again: what spiritual realities does my body show? And the hardest one to learn, for me, was — your body reveals your soul. And I would look at myself in the mirror, and I’d be like: I am a broken man. I’m a coyote. I am starving. I’m a scavenger. Like — I will wither away and die unless something changes. And my body is telling me that, and it’s telling everyone else that. It’s saying, “Please love me. Please help me. Please take care of me.” And then it’d be like — okay, so then maybe I should heal through the body. And how do I do that? And — I mean, you should read the book. Coby: So there’s your cliffhanger. Go do it. Yeah — I think we’re probably out of time, aren’t we, Natalia? I haven’t been paying attention. So yeah, we’ve got to shut down, and I think that is a perfect place to end, because I will just vouch personally that — yeah, if you are in a spot where you’re going, “I don’t know where to go next. I don’t know what the first step is” — and if you’re not there now, you probably will be at some point — I think Josh’s book is a great place to start, as far as someone vulnerably and honestly giving a story of, “Okay, here’s how I took the first step.” And sometimes, like Dante, it’s downhill before it’s uphill, right? But here’s how you take the first step forward, until eventually you can start becoming whole again. Josh: Totally. And it’s an ongoing journey — but we’re on the way. Coby: We’re on the way, dude. Josh: [inaudible] Thank you so much for having me. Coby: Thanks for being here — such a joy. Thanks, everybody. We’ll link Josh’s book and his other materials in the episode. Thanks for listening, as always. We’ll see you next time on — not “the PeppTalk”— Josh: On just “PeppTalk.” The PeppTalk Podcast, Alexa! Coby: PeppTalk. We’ll see you then. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit pepperdineuniversity.substack.com (https://pepperdineuniversity.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

2. 

   27 May 2026

   The Only Way Out is Through ft. Daniel Voll

   What does it take to find the story that only you can tell — and then muster the courage to go get it? In this episode of PeppTalk, Coby sits down with Daniel Voll — journalist, playwright, and screenwriter — for a wide-ranging conversation on curiosity, craft, community, and the future of storytelling. From reporting in war zones and tracking down war criminals to executive producing the hit Netflix series Escaping Twin Flames and currently filming a 9/11 documentary at Guantanamo Bay, Daniel’s career has taken him to some of the world’s most complex and consequential stories.Fresh off serving as a guest speaker for Seaver College's “Directing for the Screen” course this spring, Daniel opens up about how storytelling is sometimes more about questions than answers — and why the best journalists, filmmakers, and playwrights are really just people brave enough to interrogate themselves. He reflects on what it means to enter dangerous subcultures with a tape recorder and no agenda other than to listen, and he has earned trust from the most unlikely of characters by simply giving them a space to speak. Coby and Daniel dig into the creative tension between the solitary work of writing and the collaborative electricity of theater and film and consider why Daniel believes the age of AI is not the death of human storytelling — but possibly its greatest invitation yet.His message to aspiring storytellers is clear: take notes, follow your obsessions, interview your parents, and don't be afraid of the darkness in your own imagination. The only way out is through.Daniel Voll is a journalist, playwright, screenwriter, and executive producer whose work has appeared in Vanity Fair and Esquire. His new book, On the Run with Mad Bombers, Outlaw Lovers, and Movie Stars, is available now.Get the book here - https://www.amazon.com/Bombers-Outlaw-Lovers-Movie-Stars/dp/1958861421 (https://www.amazon.com/Bombers-Outlaw-Lovers-Movie-Stars/dp/1958861421)Learn more about Pepperdine University - https://www.pepperdine.edu/ (https://www.pepperdine.edu/)Connect with Pepperdine: Like us on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/pepperdine (https://www.facebook.com/pepperdine) Follow us on Twitter - https://twitter.com/pepperdine (https://twitter.com/pepperdine) Follow us on Instagram - https://instagram.com/pepperdine (https://instagram.com/pepperdine) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit pepperdineuniversity.substack.com (https://pepperdineuniversity.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

3. 

   25 May 2026

   Truth Has Nothing to Fear ft. Jonathan Koch

   What does it mean to pursue truth in a world that would rather keep ideas safe and untested? In this episode of PeppTalk, Alexa and Coby sit down with Professor Jonathan Koch — professor of English and Great Books at Seaver College — to explore what a genuine liberal arts education looks like: when faith and learning are treated not as separate things to be integrated, but as something that was never meant to be divided in the first place.Professor Koch draws on John Milton's Areopagitica to argue that truth doesn't emerge from debate but is revealed through it. This distinction shapes everything from how he teaches Shakespeare across LA's theater scene to why he advises Pepperdine's Veritas Club, a student-led space where intellectual rigor and Christian faith meet weekly to test the ideas that matter most. For prospective students wondering whether a liberal arts degree is worth it, Professor Koch has a simple but countercultural answer: your vocation right now is to be a student. Do that well, and the rest will follow.Jonathan Koch is an Assistant Professor of English at Pepperdine University's Seaver College, where he teaches Renaissance poetry, Shakespeare, and Great Books. He received his PhD from Washington University in St. Louis and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Caltech and the Huntington Library. He serves as faculty advisor for Pepperdine's Veritas Club. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit pepperdineuniversity.substack.com (https://pepperdineuniversity.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

Who has been a guest on Relationships - A PeppTalk Podcast

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Kelly Haer
• Dee Dee Mayer
• Dee Dee
• DeeDee Mayer

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

6 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

3 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 13 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

14

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

32