[SPEAKER_06]: What's up, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls around the world?
[SPEAKER_06]: I'd like to welcome you back to Real Talk with Zubi.
[SPEAKER_06]: On today's episode, I'm going to be talking to a public speaker, an author and the founder of Embrace the Truth, and this is Abdomar.
[SPEAKER_06]: He welcome to the show.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for having me, Zubi.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's great to be here.
[SPEAKER_06]: Great to see you.
[SPEAKER_06]: Welcome to Dubai.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, it's wonderful to be here.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've spent my second time, and the first time was in the summer, so I had that commensurate wall of heat that hits you when you walk outside.
[SPEAKER_00]: But right now, it's awesome out here.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's really, really beautiful.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I love this place.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, the hospitality second to none, and just the scenery is wonderful too.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's great to be here.
[SPEAKER_00]: Awesome.
[SPEAKER_06]: Well, first things first, for my audience who are not familiar with who you are and what you do, please introduce yourself.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sure.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, I'm Abdul Murray.
[SPEAKER_00]: People often ask me, you know, Abdul and Murray, what's the deal?
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you have this like Middle Eastern first name in this Scottish last name?
[SPEAKER_00]: And the story I'm told, because I wasn't there when it happened, but when the family came over to the United States, our last name was really pronounced Middle A.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so when we came over,
[SPEAKER_00]: So they wrote that down, and that's what happened.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I'm a lawyer by training, and also practice law for a major law firm, commercial litigation for a long time.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was a Muslim, and I became a Christian in the year 2000, after a nine-year search into the historical evidence for the Christian faith, and found it to be credible.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was so many levels and answered, like, literally, like, serious existential questions and philosophical and scientific,
[SPEAKER_00]: and these kind of things, and so then I went into public speaking, where I talk about the intersection of issues of faith, particularly the Christian faith, but different faiths of all kinds, how faith intersects with culture, especially emerging cultural trends, and in no various things with the credibility of the Christian faith, does it match up with philosophy and theology and these kind of things, and how is the stack up?
[SPEAKER_00]: in the competition of world views that are out there.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's what we do at embrace the truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's an organization where we have a small staff and I'm the speaker and chief speaker and writer.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I got a great research assistant who helps out as well, but that's what we do.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we travel all over the world to do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, that's what I'm doing here in Dubai is just to talk about, to see sites, to see friends, and then occasionally speak on some of those topics.
[SPEAKER_06]: Fantastic.
[SPEAKER_06]: Well, we're going to get into those, but I want to learn a little bit more about you first.
[SPEAKER_06]: So you said your family went over to the states where from
[SPEAKER_00]: So Lebanon, from Lebanon, my understanding is based on the history that's been relayed to me by quite a few people, is that my great-grandfather had come over.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then my grandfather was actually born in Indiana.
[SPEAKER_00]: But then they moved back when he was baby, 9th or 11 on him, they were there for a long time and the family emigrated back to the U.S. in the late 60s.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was that.
[SPEAKER_00]: We just, you know, with a lot of Lebanese,
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of areas generally, but a lot of Lebanese and specific, they ended up going to the Detroit area because of the availability of jobs that were easy to get, are working in a lot of motive on the line.
[SPEAKER_00]: And like a lot of the Middle Eastern immigrants, they came together, they lived multiple families in one house, they shared the bills, they worked at the auto industry, they got enough money to open up their own businesses, and then bam, they started doing that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that's what happened with the family.
[SPEAKER_00]: Interesting.
[SPEAKER_06]: Well, tell me a little bit more about your parents.
[SPEAKER_06]: They are both from Lebanon.
[SPEAKER_00]: So my mom is actually from the States.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: And she was Catholic and my father when he came over in that while he was working at a restaurant and she converted to a slum when she went my father.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when she met my dad, but shortly after, and then they got married and all that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So my dad, and that family came over from the from Lebanon.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, yeah, and then I was born in Detroit, and then we moved into the suburbs because my dad and my mom were keen on us getting a really good education, you know, in how it is Eastern Middle Easterners, education is everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they wanted to make sure we got the maximized opportunities and all that in my dad work.
[SPEAKER_00]: And my mom both worked really, really hard.
[SPEAKER_00]: to make a better life for us.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, uh, gives my dad grew up pretty poor.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the old country, in the small village in the south of Lebanon, uh, and he did not want that for his kids.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so he worked really hard to make sure that, um, we had a, uh, uh, all the opportunities available to us.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he did a great job because, uh, uh, it's a very happy childhood, very happy life in the strong family.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's good to hear that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: So what was it that led you to doing the work that you do now?
[SPEAKER_06]: I mean, it's a pretty unique thing that you do traveling around the states, traveling around the world, talking about the intersection between faith and culture and society, tackling different issues, all of that.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's quite an unorthodox path so why did you decide to choose it and you can start this story from wherever you feel as a relevant beginning.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so I feel like I think one of the reasons is I'm a natural born advocate, you know there are people who are born with certain skills and certain passions and I fundamentally believe that we, you know, we all have a general purpose and the general purpose of life I think from my perspective is to know God and make him known.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think like me, no greater thing that a person can have in their life than to have a connection to the divine.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I believe that there's a God out of who wants to connect with us.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's our general purpose.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we all have very specific purposes based on how we're wired.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm wired as a natural-born advocate.
[SPEAKER_00]: Speaking in public has always come somewhat easy to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love the way words are put together the way you can craft words to
[SPEAKER_00]: sort of expressive truths in a beautiful way.
[SPEAKER_00]: The big fan of that, so I was always like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So when I went to school, I received my undergraduate in psychology and ended up getting a law degree because I was a natural board advocate.
[SPEAKER_00]: I like the way evidence works and how you can marshal evidence to make a case for something.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's what law school helped me to do and then being a lawyer, same thing, you could make a case for something.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I always was driven by big, big questions.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like what are the big issues?
[SPEAKER_00]: I like fighting about the details.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I say fighting, I don't mean like getting involved in quarrels.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm a big fan of getting involved in an argument, but in the classical sense of an argument, where you and I are having a discussion, let's say, and you have a position, and I have a position, and if you put together a good argument, a series of premises that if true and logically valid lead to a conclusion, and we debate that issue.
[SPEAKER_00]: Quarals, I'm not just a fan of, I mean, not a mind conflict, but I like to avoid it as possible, I like to get into the issues as opposed to attacking each other, which I think is surely needed today.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're super into Quarals, and not so much into argumentation, but because I like to talk about big picture issues, you know, ultimate destiny, where are we all going, societally, you know, in this world, but also where we're going,
[SPEAKER_00]: Beyond this, is there something immaterial about life and about purpose that drives us to have meaning and purpose in our lives?
[SPEAKER_00]: So those questions always stalked me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, even as a kid, me and my friends would sit around and we talk about sports, girls, movies, and all that stuff like any kid would do, but at some point they always became eternal questions.
[SPEAKER_00]: Big ticket questions.
[SPEAKER_00]: So those always interested in me.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you took my advocacy as a lawyer and my desire to talk about big issues.
[SPEAKER_00]: and you put those together and you have what I do now which is talk about those things and because I'm passionate about matters of faith and I'm passionate about matters of culture, what better place to step in as an advocate than in the places where culture and faith collide and sometimes they merge and sometimes they collide and I'll talk about both aspects, not just the collision.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think a lot of people are big on, you know, faith in culture.
[SPEAKER_00]: The culture is always against faith
[SPEAKER_00]: That's true sometimes, but sometimes it's not, sometimes culture informs the way we understand our faith and we can express our faith.
[SPEAKER_00]: Other times, I think the solidity of objective truths that I think matters of faith, particularly in my view, the Christian faith, can offer answers to culture.
[SPEAKER_00]: can't help the collision be not so so jarring and we can actually speak to the mind in the heart and I would say one last thing on this is a big part of this for me is I've always been a fan of not just giving propositional truths but giving propositional truths.
[SPEAKER_00]: in relevant ways, in ways that touch a person's mind and heart.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just like it was for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, talk about that nine-year journey about coming from a non-Christian worldview to a Christian worldview, and one of the chief reasons was because not only did I find it propositionally true, historically, and all these kinds of things, but I found it existentially true, and it answered the biggest questions on my heart and my mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so because that's how I was sort of reached to find this sense of purpose and meaning,
[SPEAKER_00]: I have a desperate desire to what other people the sort of experience, the same thing I experienced, and I'm currently experiencing as well.
[SPEAKER_06]: So your organization is called Embrace the Truth, and I've noticed in our conversation already, you've used the word Truth.
[SPEAKER_06]: What many many times?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_06]: How do you know what is true and what is not?
[SPEAKER_00]: Hmm.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that's a great question.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that, you know, when you look at the classical ways, you know, the stuff, but also there's a personal ways.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think, you know, someone wants to find truth as that which even when you ignore it still exists, you know, it is the kind of thing where your truth claims and everyone makes truth claims.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even the statement that there is no such thing as objective truth is a statement about objective truth because
[SPEAKER_00]: Then there are objective truths, and if you make the statement and you want to say that statement, there's no objective truths, is true, or then that statement has to be objectively true.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's no getting around it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And how I think you know it is, one is that there has to be empirical adequacy.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, does what you say conform to reality as you know it?
[SPEAKER_00]: And can you find enough good reasons to believe something is true?
[SPEAKER_00]: So, if I were to make a claim, for example, whether it's a mathematical claim or a scientific claim, you know, Newton's laws of motion and gravity and all these kind of things, and do they bear out?
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you verify them mathematically and scientifically?
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's a lot of things you can do that with.
[SPEAKER_00]: Other things are historical truths, you can look through the documents and the evidence such as it is, whether it's archeological or documentary and eyewitness testimony.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you can say, here's a truth claim, you know, let's say Jesus, you know, existed and walked around, you know, first century Judea and did inset certain things with the Bible records.
[SPEAKER_00]: is that actually accurate, then you can go and look at the actual historical evidence, the archaeological evidence, the documentary evidence, and see that, yeah, this is what happened, and we have a high likelihood of probability or high probability that that's actually accurate.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's the empirical adequacy is what I'm talking about there is, is that you make a claim and does it conform to the evidence that's available.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the second thing is it has to be logically coherent.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because there are certain things that aren't philosophically, sorry, that aren't scientifically or historically falseifiable or verifiable, they're more propositional, you know, like a philosophical claim or a theological claim.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the question is, can you...
[SPEAKER_00]: field logically, and philosophically, address that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you short up with a good argumentation?
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's an example I'd give.
[SPEAKER_00]: The proposition that God exists.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's multiple arguments.
[SPEAKER_00]: for the idea that a supreme being actually exists.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of my favorites is by a philosopher, he has a version of it called the cosmological argument from contingency.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a lot of fancy words, just basically mean that you can prove God's existence from the existence of everything else.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, Gottfried will have him lied and said, we look at the world and you see there's only two categories of things.
[SPEAKER_00]: Generally speaking, you have contingent things, things that exist because something else previous to them existed.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this microphone only exists because the material that makes it up, existed, engineers designed it and manufacturers put it together.
[SPEAKER_00]: In other words, it doesn't explain its own existence here.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even those manufacturers, they all have a contingency because they are explained by their parents.
[SPEAKER_00]: The universe itself, whether you believe in the standard cosmological argument of the big bang where everything was from a point of singularity exploded into the universe, or you believe it's eternal, which is not really the standard view, it could have been different.
[SPEAKER_00]: The universe could be smaller.
[SPEAKER_00]: The atoms, the number of atoms could be less.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's contingent.
[SPEAKER_00]: It needs something else to explain it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So where God comes in is, you have everything which is contingent.
[SPEAKER_00]: It all needs to be explained by something prior to itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you can't have an infinite regress of causes.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I can't say that, you know, I'm caused by my parents, and my parents are caused by their parents, and their parents are caused by their parents.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you can't have that go back infinitely.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, we have a Muslim scholar, a Muslim philosopher to think for this idea, he's called Al-Qazali, Al-Qazali, posited the idea that you can't have an infinite regress of events.
[SPEAKER_00]: And here's why, because you and I are sitting here now.
[SPEAKER_00]: So now exists, we know that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is one moment in a number of successive moments, but you can't have an infinite regress back.
[SPEAKER_00]: because if you had an infinite regress back you could never start counting because there's an infinity in the past and if there's an infinity in the past there's no moment zero to start up from but here we are so you should be able to count up to now which means you have to have a moment zero so time has to begin
[SPEAKER_00]: So the thing that creates all the contingent beings in the world and time has to be timeless and necessary.
[SPEAKER_00]: In other words, it can't not exist.
[SPEAKER_00]: You have to have a starting point somewhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: A thing that explains its own existence.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that's God.
[SPEAKER_00]: What else could it possibly be?
[SPEAKER_00]: It can't be abstract principles because they don't do anything.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, you know, justice and time and love and all these things.
[SPEAKER_00]: they don't exist in and of themselves and they can't do anything anyway, even if they did, but a being can.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, if I want to prove that God exists, and I claim that to be true, I can show it philosophically by this one argument, and there's many others to, we can give, you know, obviously, just way more, you can talk about.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that's one of my favorites.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because it's kind of hard to refute it because you need to have a starting point.
[SPEAKER_00]: You just do.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the most natural explanation for starting point is God.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's how you know things are true.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're empirically adequate, they're logically coherent, and also logically consistent in this a number of ways.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it does take the work to go and find out if it's actually true.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: What is the FYI, anyone who follows me already knows, I believe in God and I share your faith.
[SPEAKER_06]: But for the sake of argument and explanation given this is your world, what do you think is the strongest argument against that particular line of reason as evidence for God?
[SPEAKER_06]: Because I myself have made that argument for people when they ask you know why.
[SPEAKER_06]: specifically believe that God exists or, you know, what is my logical and rational perspective that's one of the arguments that I've used, but I'm curious from your perspective.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: Obviously there are millions of people out there who do not believe that and they also think that they hold the truth, just like you hold the truth.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: So for the sake of argument and making this an interesting podcast, what do you think is the best argument against that?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and I've heard a lot of them, because I view dialogues and debates with people who don't agree with me.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, that's my favorite thing to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: Isn't it talking to people who don't agree with me?
[SPEAKER_00]: And when it comes to liveness, is contingency argument.
[SPEAKER_00]: One, people have either said, you can have a infinite regress.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what they've argued is that when you look at the state of math, for example, so you and I are standing about sitting about four feet apart.
[SPEAKER_00]: If we were to cross the distance halfway, now it's two feet, and then one foot, and then half of foot, and then three inches, and then one and a half inches, and you can keep going and going and going and get it smaller and smaller and smaller, and you can never actually get to zero.
[SPEAKER_00]: even though you and I might touch and our atoms will come into whatever close proximity they can possibly come into but they'll never actually get to zero because you can keep having the number and so they'll say that's an infinite regress of of distance so you can have infinite regress of distance why not an infinite regress of time okay that's been the response now I think that my response to that is that what you're talking about
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I want to use the word fiction very carefully here because I don't mean a falsehood.
[SPEAKER_00]: What I mean is a mathematical fiction that allows us to actually do math.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's real math.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not fictional math, but it doesn't mean that there's no way to bridge a distance.
[SPEAKER_00]: We can bridge the distance even at a subatomic level.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a point in which you can't get closer based on the forces within the subatomic particles.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that argument relies on a fiction.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm talking about actual.
[SPEAKER_00]: regresses of time.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's one argument in response.
[SPEAKER_00]: The other argument in response is that, yes, there's a necessary cause, but it doesn't have to be God.
[SPEAKER_00]: It could be an impersonal force, kind of like Hindus believe, but the Brahman, the Brahman, is this impersonal force, that is the source of all life, that once we realize our connection to it, we stop re incarnating, we become one with it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sort of like Star Wars.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I don't want to like demean it, but that's kind of where George Lucas got the whole idea, sure.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that is a response as well, or that it could be the singularity itself when the universe was in a state of sort of infinite density and then popped into existence because the conditions were right for it.
[SPEAKER_00]: That could be the cause.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sounds like a miracle to me, but, okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, that's a good friend of mine who has put it this way.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's like, you know, Christians believe in a, in a, and Muslims, by the way, as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: But Christians believe in a virgin birth of Jesus, that he came, he was born of a virgin.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in a lot of our atheist friends will say, that's just simply unbelievable.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you believe that there was nothing, and then suddenly there was everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you believe in a version birth too.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, how would posit that yours is a little harder to believe than Mike, if you have a God who exists outside of nature, he can definitely manipulate the nature he created.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if you have no God at all, and then there's nothing, there are no things.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, no things do nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: How can they create everything?
[SPEAKER_00]: So you believe, you have a little more faith that I do.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, in that kind of a thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, I think that there is something that would be miraculous in a universe that pops into existence
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, in my conversations with all sorts of people, I think something that I would say perhaps trips up or impedes a lot of people with a more secular worldview is the concept of God, I guess, like as a as a character.
[SPEAKER_06]: So, I'm sure you've heard the terms, you know, whether it's skydaddy or, you know, man in the sky.
[SPEAKER_06]: Even, you know, even believers and non-believers alike.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: Oftentimes, use this type of language.
[SPEAKER_06]: Obviously, there are paintings, depicting God and, you know, it's a man in the sky with a, you know, a long beard and, you know, he's reaching out there and so on.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I think that,
[SPEAKER_06]: idea people use to kind of straw man theism in general right they like to have this idea of oh you know you believe in a man in this guy with you know it's long beard and so on sure some people might have that conception of God in their head
[SPEAKER_06]: other people have, it's almost like just an invisible thing.
[SPEAKER_06]: I think different people, even within the same faith, I think each individual has a different concept in their brain when they think of God, what God is, who God is, what God may look like or not is God male is God.
[SPEAKER_06]: You know, people get hung up on like these weird.
[SPEAKER_06]: Oh yeah, I've got a lot of very weird things you know what does he look like what color is he is he's in mail there's a female it's kind of like yeah, I don't know I have maybe my own concepts but when you when you when you think of the concept of God mm-hmm and what do you envision or imagine yeah in that sense do you think of God more as a
[SPEAKER_06]: You know, a character, you know, according to the Christian worldview we're made in his image.
[SPEAKER_06]: So I think we tend to view that as like, okay, we're some type of reflection of him.
[SPEAKER_06]: So we kind of project that onto God, like, just how do you perceive or conceive God when you say, or when you hear that word?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so this question is so incredibly important.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of my favorite authors, A.W.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tozer, and one of his books, I'm trying to remember the title of which one.
[SPEAKER_00]: I read like a bunch of his books, but I can't remember which one he said this in, but this is what he said.
[SPEAKER_00]: what you think of God when someone asks you what is God like is the single most important thing about you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I find that to be a fascinating statement.
[SPEAKER_00]: So in the answer to that, I sort of walk in making sure that this most important question about who I am is a person in my ability to understand how I got here in the first place is carefully put.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, one is the Bible informs me and I think classical monotheism would actually have this of across all monotheistic faiths, but the Bible is specific for me would say that God is spirit, in fact the Bible does say in fact God is spirit, and that all the metaphorical uses of the words like hands and the right arm and all that, they mean to convey certain attributes of God, but does God actually have a right arm, does he have a finger with
[SPEAKER_00]: These are all metaphorical uses of an understanding of God doing something in actual history, but they're metaphorical uses.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think of God when I think of God, I think if he messes the seat of all existence.
[SPEAKER_00]: He is not a being amongst other beings.
[SPEAKER_00]: He is the source of all being.
[SPEAKER_00]: This goes back to the light and its argument, you know, is that he's the necessary being without which nothing else could exist.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he is the source, the grounding of all of existence.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I don't think of him.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it's easy to anthropomorphize a being like that, to say, you know, because I do believe he's in, he has, there's the oftenies.
[SPEAKER_00]: The oftenies is simply a manifestation of God in the physical world.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the Bible records several times when God is appears in some form to people in a mitigated form.
[SPEAKER_06]: Do you mean in the Old Testament?
[SPEAKER_00]: In the Old Testament.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whether it's the three who come to Abraham at the trees of memory, which I think symbolizes the Trinity, actually, or it's the way in which even God shows his back, not as actual back.
[SPEAKER_00]: To Moses.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's Moses that show me your glory and God says look you can't look at me and live And this is where I think it gets to this this point about what God is like this story Such a powerful one because it's sophisticated I want to unpack that in the second here because Moses is operating
[SPEAKER_00]: in a paradigm where you have conceptions of these pagan deities, whether it's raw, or ISIS, or Osiris, or whatever the Egyptian gods, the pantheon, happened to be at the time that was dominant in the most dominant empire in the region.
[SPEAKER_00]: All of those gods were contingent.
[SPEAKER_00]: They all have origin stories.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were all born in some way.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they're conceptually inadequate already.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they, of course, mere the Greek gods, the Greek gods, whether it was Zeus or Aphrodite or whoever, they came from the titans, and the titans themselves came from the primordials of Gaia and Kronos and all these things.
[SPEAKER_00]: But they even emerged from the ether.
[SPEAKER_00]: sort of this void that existed that everything else emerged from so all these gods have our contingent they all have this like limitation on them they're not truly transcendent and Moses says show me your life and there's a hierarchy that is exactly and Moses says show me your glory and gods like
[SPEAKER_00]: I can only show you a metaphorical version of my glory which is my back.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm going to shout to you from seeing all of me because you can't see me in live.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think what is being conveyed there is the magnificence of the seat of all of existence.
[SPEAKER_00]: Cannot possibly be held by limited human mind and that mind not lose itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's sort of like, you know, we're sitting here in proximity to the tallest building in the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a, it's a man-made structure.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it is, there's a sense when you sit at the bottom of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a sense of this awe, you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: And awe is simply being impressed to the point of being a little bit scared, you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's hard to take it in by scale when you're sitting at this, you like, this is enormous.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you go to the top of it, which I have not yet done, maybe they'll change that, sometimes soon, but there's a sense of all about that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now take that and multiply it almost infinitely, and that's what I think of as God.
[SPEAKER_00]: This infinite being that mitigates
[SPEAKER_00]: our ability, he mitigates himself in a way where we can encounter him, but if he showed himself to us fully, would be dazzling to the point where we couldn't take it.
[SPEAKER_00]: We would literally die of, I was madness as it were.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, I also think, I think of this God.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's one thing, I should say, is that that to me responds to sort of an atheistic straw-maning argument, is God is the sky daddy.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like that is a reductionistic view.
[SPEAKER_00]: It does not take classical amount of theism seriously, and it certainly doesn't take biblical Christian theism seriously at all, because it doesn't attack.
[SPEAKER_00]: what we really think of as God, that's one, but, and one of the things this is sort of, if you don't mind my going on about this, there's something about the biblical language that I find amazing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So when Moses, again, learned to Moses in Exodus 3, when he encounters God at the burning
[SPEAKER_00]: He says, no, who shall I say has sat me when he says, go to Israel, go to Israel, go to the Hebrews and tell them that God has sent you and tell ramacies to let my people go.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Moses says, when I go to them, who am I going to say, sat me?
[SPEAKER_00]: What is your name, basically?
[SPEAKER_00]: And what's interesting is, we don't know exactly the way to pronounce it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the Hebrew letters, you'd hey, of love, hey.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we don't know how this pronounce it exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: But let's just go with the standard way of Yahweh.
[SPEAKER_00]: It means I am that I am.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's remarkable to me, Zubi, because
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're going to give a name, you can give all these names, Hapshepsuit, and the different pharaohs and rye, or Cyrus, and all these different names that mean whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the idea that God says, I am that I am is remarkable, because centuries later, the light nits and others would come up with the contingency argument where they say God has had necessary being.
[SPEAKER_00]: He just is, and centuries and centuries before lightenance.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Bible says, God's name is I am.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am the necessary being.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's remarkable to me because from Genesis, then you go to John, chapter one.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it says, in the beginning, it was the word.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the word was with God, the word was God.
[SPEAKER_00]: The word.
[SPEAKER_00]: So God takes just
[SPEAKER_00]: centuries of philosophy emboils them down to his name, and it's the God of the word who can use such an economy of words to describe what philosophers take centuries to figure out in just his name.
[SPEAKER_00]: I find that remarkable.
[SPEAKER_00]: I find that amazing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So from Genesis all the way to John.
[SPEAKER_00]: I started from Exodus all the way to John.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me see this.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think this beautiful tapestry of weaving of with the Bible describes of his God.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's a long way to answer your question.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think it's such a critical question.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_06]: That's that's very interesting.
[SPEAKER_06]: How do you um and how do you conceptualize or
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and that's a great question because obviously when we think of, you know, God doesn't have a body, but then there's this person walking around who claims to be God or that Christians say is God and he's certainly got a body, it's physical.
[SPEAKER_00]: How I square that is one, I look at the character of this God, who is the seat of all of existence, who condescends to reveal himself in any way to us.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's already a condescension.
[SPEAKER_00]: When the God of the Universe who doesn't have to create us creates us, he doesn't have to do it, but he doesn't.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in a way that I think is selfless, I think Christian Theism actually makes sense of this.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Jesus Christ is the incarnation of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you think a look at the word Karnay, which means meat or flesh, he is the inflectionment incarnation of God, what the second person of the Trinity,
[SPEAKER_00]: does, so there's God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, all one God in three persons, we can get into that if you'd like to.
[SPEAKER_00]: The second person of the Trinity, God the Son, willfully doesn't divest himself of his divinity, but takes on Godhood.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sorry, he takes on humanity, he takes on flesh, and he walks among us.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he is 100% of what it takes to be God and he is 100% of what it takes to be human.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he's walking around with both of those natures, a human and a divine nature in one person.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now to understand that, in my view, you have to make a distinction between a person that's sorry, the word person and the word nature.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is an important part for me, two hundreds, because when we say person, we think of an insular human being, you're a separate human being than I am.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you're a person, and I'm a person.
[SPEAKER_00]: But when we when I'm using this word person when it comes to like the Trinity and the incarnation of God in Jesus Think of it as a center of consciousness.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if I were to say what is this microphone?
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, this is a electronic device.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can say a lot of things about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: What is it's nature?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's fundamental nature.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the non-living thing
[SPEAKER_00]: before it's any of those other things, it's a non-living thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I have a nature as well, and it's different than the microphone, but I have a nature, so the microphone has a nature, I have a nature, and my nature is living thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm a lot of other things, but my fundamental nature is living thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the what that I am is living thing, the what that this is is non-living thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you can't talk about the microphone in terms of its personhood.
[SPEAKER_00]: It has no personhood.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I do.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I have one additional quality at least one than the microphone does, which is personhood.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I have one what and one who, and my who, my whoness as it were, is not the same thing as my what.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I have a nature and a person.
[SPEAKER_00]: So these two things are distinct categories.
[SPEAKER_00]: So when we say that Jesus has two natures, he is one person with two what, he is one who with two what, he has a divine nature and a human nature.
[SPEAKER_00]: But they share the same person.
[SPEAKER_00]: the same center of consciousness in the person who is Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's how I square that is that God has found a way, and you would think that an infinitely powerful being can take seeming paradoxes, not contradictions, but paradoxes, and find a solution.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that's who Jesus, that's how I understand Jesus to be the second person of the Trinity incarnate and fleshed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Does that mean that he somehow limited now?
[SPEAKER_00]: No.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have sold my boy.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've got three kids, three great kids.
[SPEAKER_00]: My boy is 21 years old now.
[SPEAKER_00]: But when he was far younger than 21, when he was in single digits, and as a father, you're going to a new father.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're going to enjoy this whole thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you play with your kids, and there's going to be just a physicality in the playing with them.
[SPEAKER_00]: When my boy and I would wrestle, I did not use my full strength, because that would be a crime.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I wanted him to exert hits, so I got to give enough resistance to enjoy the physical experience without going too far with that.
[SPEAKER_00]: That I suddenly not have all the faculties and strength because I resisted using it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course not.
[SPEAKER_00]: I emptied myself of my full strength for a limited capacity of helping my son grow physically.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Bible uses a word, canosis.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Bible says in the Ogashing and Philippians, I believe it is chapter two, that God, that Jesus emptied himself, that God, the Son, emptied himself, the Greek word canosis means not to completely divest yourself of your power, but to restrict yourself, to restrict your power, so that he could dwell among us as a servant.
[SPEAKER_00]: So how I square the whole thing is that Jesus remains fully divine, incredibly powerful.
[SPEAKER_00]: He can work miracles.
[SPEAKER_00]: He can calm the seas, nature or bays him.
[SPEAKER_00]: He can forgive sins.
[SPEAKER_00]: And who alone can forgive sins, but God.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you see him do this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yet he also restrains himself.
[SPEAKER_00]: and he allows himself to even go to a cross for a specific purpose.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that purpose is to pay a penalty that I deserve to pay.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I can't afford to pay because that penalty would put me outside of God's presence.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so in order to bridge that, he has to be my representative.
[SPEAKER_00]: He has to live as a man or as a human, so he can take the place of a human and pay the price that humanity deserves to pay.
[SPEAKER_00]: But because he's God, he's perfect, so he has no death of his own.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if he had his own death, if he was just another guy, he'd have his own death to pay.
[SPEAKER_00]: Therefore, he can't pay mine, he's got his own stuff to worry about.
[SPEAKER_00]: But because he's perfect, he doesn't have any debts to pay.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he can pay my debts.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's why I've been Christian for years.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's why I love it so much.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I can go on and on and on and on and I won't because that's true.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it cohere so wonderfully to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: So my conception of God is a seat of all existence.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then this person of Jesus who's walking around among us, as the seat of all of existence, still condescends to walk among us on this forgotten outpost and die in this lonely hill.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, province that was inconsequential to Rome, but they still kept it around.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that, when the message spread, into the most powerful empire of the world, the rest of the world would hear it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just find such a divine timing in history of the whole thing.
[SPEAKER_06]: Well, you've said a lot there and there's a lot there for listeners wherever they are in their faith journey or lack there of I think there's a lot for people to ponder about Something I wanted to ask you shifting gears a little bit but you know obviously relevant to everything you were saying is being
[SPEAKER_06]: Where we are now, I mean literally as we record this, we're in the Middle East, but we are both Westerners in many regards from the UK or from the US and over the last decades in particular there has been a shift in all sorts of things.
[SPEAKER_06]: Culturally, religiously, socially, legally, we're going through a strange phase.
[SPEAKER_06]: I'd say the last decade in particular,
[SPEAKER_06]: 2015 to 2024 was a very strange one, culturally, many, many levels.
[SPEAKER_06]: What do you think is, this is a big question, so you can answer this however you see it.
[SPEAKER_06]: But what do you think is,
[SPEAKER_06]: going on in the West, that is at the roots of a lot of the social and cultural.
[SPEAKER_06]: I would say degradation or regression, perhaps some other people would call it progression.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's a difficult to even articulate the question, because I think everyone knows, regardless of someone's beliefs, I think everyone who lives in the West, whether you're in Western Europe or US, Canada, Australia, everyone knows, any sane person has felt this strange shift in weirdness, we've all kind of been living through.
[SPEAKER_06]: It seems like truth itself has become much more up-forward debate.
[SPEAKER_06]: I've heard you use the term post-truth society, as of other commentators, you know, that we're living in this post-truth society, where instead of talking about the truth and opinions we talk about his truth and her truth and my truth and more truth and, you know, everything's, whatever you feel is their reality which in itself seems
[SPEAKER_00]: bit of a religious claim but yeah that's it yeah yeah I don't what do you think is it the root yeah he thinks it's the root of it so at the root of it and at the risk of sounding a little bit like a broken record as I do think the Bible speaks to this specifically which is why I think you know there's this great phrase it's a phrase that forms a title of the book by Leslie Nubigan it's called Christ our eternal contemporary okay I love this phrase because eternal contemporary means that though he's ancient
[SPEAKER_00]: He's always a relevant and I'm going to defend that in a second.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so I so the post truth culture So in 2016, you know Oxford English dictionaries has a word of the year every single year.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think 24 24 24's Word of the year was brain rot
[SPEAKER_00]: Which totally makes sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't know what this term was until I asked my kids and they told me like oh I know a lot about what brain rot actually is Yeah, it's a whole thing, you know, it's exactly and and apparently gen Alpha's taken of this thing like like crazy and they're exploring it It was abandoned it seems but But in 2016 the word of the year was post truce.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, and of course that was the year of the
[SPEAKER_00]: the Hillary Clinton Donald Trump election thing going on you know and and things like alternative facts were being bandied about as well and all that kind of stuff so post truth was coined I believe in 1992 okay but it was used 2000 times more often in 2016 than all the years previously combined and
[SPEAKER_00]: So a post-truth culture loosely defined is a culture that elevates feelings and preferences above facts and truths.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now this is really important to understand what it's saying.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not saying that truth doesn't exist.
[SPEAKER_00]: The post-modernists would say that truth is all perspective.
[SPEAKER_00]: The post-modernists were trying, this is super ironic.
[SPEAKER_00]: The post-modernists, you know, whether it was Michelle Foucault and did a relevant all these guys,
[SPEAKER_00]: They were trying to say, look, the reason why we have conflict is because this set of people think they have a lot on truth, whether it's economic truth, or political truth, or religious truth, and they're trying to foist it on these set of people, and that creates conflict, because they say we have the truth, and so that creates conflict of all kinds.
[SPEAKER_00]: If we get rid of the concept of truth, and we just say everything's a perspective, everything's a conversation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, then people won't stop fighting, and they'll just talk.
[SPEAKER_00]: But, of course, saying, there's no such thing as objective truth, runs into the problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: We mentioned at the very top of the conversation where truth has to exist, because that's the even itself has to be true.
[SPEAKER_00]: So postmodernism, I believe, is actually dead.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it died its death.
[SPEAKER_00]: But when rose up from the ashes of postmodernism's death was this post-truth Phoenix.
[SPEAKER_00]: So post-truth is different.
[SPEAKER_00]: Postmodernism says there's no such thing as truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: Post-truth says, truth does exist, but it's subordinated to my preferences.
[SPEAKER_00]: My preferences and my feelings matter more, which means that if the truth happens to line up with my preferences, the preference is great.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's use it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's talk about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if the truth happens to not, if the science or the logic or the philosophy or the history flies in the face of my narrative, well then when you use it, you're being a bigot, or you're being oppressive, or you're being close-minded,
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we love these terms at people.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think at the root of it, the reason why we're post-truth now, where we elevate feelings and preferences over facts and truth, is because we have misunderstood a term, a very important term, that Western society is a built-off of.
[SPEAKER_00]: And my friend, Asgenes has put it this way, you can tell the health of a culture by how it expresses its chief virtue.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the chief virtue of the West used to be freedom.
[SPEAKER_00]: But we're not talking about freedom anymore, we're talking about autonomy.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we think those two words are the same when they're not.
[SPEAKER_00]: Autonomy comes from two Greek root words.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first word is autos, which means self.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the second word is namos, which means law.
[SPEAKER_00]: So when you're autonomous, you're not free.
[SPEAKER_00]: You are a law unto yourself.
[SPEAKER_00]: You are bounded by nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that sounds like freedom, but it's actually just bedlam and chaos.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because if I am autonomous, if I'm a law unto myself and feelings and preferences matter more than facts and truths, then that means that my feelings and my preferences matter more than the truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what happens is when I'm the
[SPEAKER_00]: God likes sovereign of my own skull-sized world, but you're also the God likes sovereign of your own skull-sized world, and your feelings in preferences matter more than the facts in the truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: And my feelings in preferences matter more than the facts in the truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: What happens when your preferences and my preferences don't match?
[SPEAKER_00]: we get a collision and I'm the god of my own skull size world and thou shalt have no other gods before me and so are you and so now someone has to lose in the fight and the person who wins is not the one with truth on their side because truth is now in the bottom shelf.
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't care about that anymore and put him in the closet.
[SPEAKER_00]: The person who wins is the one who has power, the biggest microphones, the biggest audience maybe even the most guns.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so you can see the irony, the postmodernists got rid of truth to avoid conflict, but it dies under the logical way of its own inconsistency.
[SPEAKER_00]: post-truth results in only conflict.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we've come to the spot now where we just yell at each other and I call it the Hitlerization of social commentary.
[SPEAKER_00]: If someone doesn't agree with me, they're Hitler, you know, or Mao, or Stalin, picture despotic.
[SPEAKER_06]: They always pick Hitler.
[SPEAKER_00]: They always pick Hitler.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's just easy to pick.
[SPEAKER_00]: But notice what I said, it's not that.
[SPEAKER_00]: you don't agree with, you disagree with me.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you disagree with me, you're a Hitler, that's not what the culture says.
[SPEAKER_00]: The culture says, if you don't agree with me, you can't even be neutral.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't even have a nuanced position.
[SPEAKER_00]: New wants is punished.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you can't have a considered opinion, like, you know, I don't know what I think about that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm gonna look into it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nope, sorry, agree with me, or else you're Hitler.
[SPEAKER_00]: Silence is violent, you know, these kind of things.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I understand that silence can sometimes be a bad thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: But sometimes it means that you're just being careful.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: And being careful is punished, and that's too bad.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think that desire for autonomy is that the root of what happened between 2015 and 2024, maybe even bleeding into 2025.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sure.
[SPEAKER_00]: And maybe even for some years to come.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this goes back to what I was saying about the Bible predicting it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we want autonomy.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you look at the garden of Eden's story, it's a story about autonomy.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you have this story out of an Eve.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our put into this beautiful setting.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they're given no boundaries except for one.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can do whatever you want.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can work the land.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can just do whatever you want.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they have communion directly with God.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they're purpose.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: is, or not, their truth, the truth is, they were supposed to be in communion with God.
[SPEAKER_00]: Genesis 3 says that God walks and talks with them in the cool of the day, and they only have one boundary.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can eat of any fruit you want, but of the tree of the knowledge of good or evil you shall not eat for the day you eat of it you shall show you die.
[SPEAKER_00]: and they live with that rule.
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't know how long they live with that rule.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can never bother them.
[SPEAKER_00]: The serpent comes into the picture and he says, did God really say, can I name this quote's God?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what do Adam and Eve do in response?
[SPEAKER_00]: They miss quote God back.
[SPEAKER_00]: They say, oh, God didn't say, don't eat it.
[SPEAKER_00]: God said, don't even touch it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, he never said that.
[SPEAKER_00]: They added to his command.
[SPEAKER_00]: In other words, they want to be the sovereign of the sovereign.
[SPEAKER_00]: They want autonomy.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's when the serpent knows, I've got him now.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he says, God knows that you won't die.
[SPEAKER_00]: He knows that you'll be like him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the Bible specifically says, once they hear,
[SPEAKER_00]: that they can be like God, that's when the fruit of the knowledge of the good and evil becomes desirous.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not before, right then, they wanted to be autonomous.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the seeds of the post-truth culture were planted in the very first garden.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the first post-truth people were the first people.
[SPEAKER_00]: We just now have a way to express it through social media and globalization and interconnectivity.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think that's at the root of this whole sort of bizarre decade ago.
[SPEAKER_06]: Well, you've said so many interesting things there, and it ties together so many thoughts that I've had sort of floating around in my head for the past few years, because, you know, something I notice, again, particularly in the West, and these are really big conversations that, again, regardless of people's religious beliefs, where they are on the political spectrum and so on.
[SPEAKER_06]: most people almost everyone agrees that there is a rise in polarization and confrontation and people not understanding each other very well.
[SPEAKER_06]: Most people feel less free to speak.
[SPEAKER_06]: They feel more suppressed and more censored, more self-sensoring than they did in the previous decades and also everyone and then so those are the things on the collective level, but then also on the individual level what else is a huge conversation.
[SPEAKER_06]: mental health.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: What's going on with the rise of depression, the rise of anxiety, why are so many people on SSRIs and anti-depressants?
[SPEAKER_06]: Why is the leading cause of death in many demographics, you know, self-deletion to use a YouTube friendly term?
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: What is going on here?
[SPEAKER_06]: And everyone wants to point to the simple things, social media.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's social media, it's smartphones, it's this, it's that, you know, male loneliness epidemic and so on.
[SPEAKER_06]: We hear all these terms crashing in fertility rate, dropping marriage rates, all of these things, it's the economy, it's the economy and it's the tech, those are the two kind of safe ones to go to, that everyone wants to go to, because I think people are perhaps afraid.
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm talking on a deeper, more spiritual level, it seems very obvious to me, given my own worldview, that there is a lot of spiritual warfare going on and to even understand these problems, you can't just look at, you sure, tech is a factor, of course, you know, staring at screens all day is not good for you.
[SPEAKER_06]: of course the their economic factors you know high inflation yes you're rising in house prices all these things but i think at the core these are not the sort of fundamental thing that is causing this collective and individual
[SPEAKER_06]: suicide that seems to be going on.
[SPEAKER_06]: I mean, at best a lot of nations are stagnant at worse.
[SPEAKER_06]: A lot of people feel like big cities in particular across the west that things are getting worse.
[SPEAKER_06]: They're not getting better.
[SPEAKER_06]: Whether or not that is real people have that feeling.
[SPEAKER_06]: People have that sense.
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I think a lot of it is downstream of this post-truth idea, and I think it's very deranging for people.
[SPEAKER_06]: I think it's very confusing for people to walk around all day long and to be in different settings and to constantly have to be
[SPEAKER_06]: pretending and self-sensoring and acting, I mean, look, to take the most obvious example and I feel like this has been, I must have talked about this subject on a hundred different podcasts over the past six or seven years at this point.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: But.
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm not the one who brought it to the four, but for the past decade, this obsession with transgenders.
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay, 2015, Caitlin Jenner becomes a woman, quote, unquote, and becomes woman of the year.
[SPEAKER_06]: The weirdest thing I found in that moment in 2015, I remember is just like no one asking any questions.
[SPEAKER_06]: right like I was so weird right that was the weirdest thing to me of like okay so you've got this man in his sixties who is not even an unknown like a famous person Olympic athlete one medals as a man and you know various categories and so on and then one day you know says you know I identify as a woman right I believe in my life as a woman now
[SPEAKER_06]: And no one goes, what do you mean?
[SPEAKER_06]: What does that mean?
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: Part in, like, I have some questions, all right?
[SPEAKER_06]: Like, sure.
[SPEAKER_06]: And no one did that.
[SPEAKER_06]: It was just like, boom, all of a sudden, the pronouns change, and there's no questions.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's just celebration.
[SPEAKER_06]: And now this is a woman and so.
[SPEAKER_06]: And everyone is supposed to just, like, except it was like a very strange moment to me, where, like, everyone just suspend everything you've known in your entire life.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: right don't ask any questions or you're a big hit, you're a transphobia, you're hey, or what do you like just just go with it and then that was kind of like the first mainstream version of it and then literally for the next decade it's been this whole thing of course you could talk about what's going on with the sports and locker rooms and burn-outs and this and this and this and this and it's just like first of all it's like
[SPEAKER_06]: where did this issue come from?
[SPEAKER_06]: Like, why is this the topic?
[SPEAKER_06]: Like why is this so important?
[SPEAKER_06]: And also how and why are just millions of people suddenly either going along with it and pretending they've suddenly believed this forever that you know men can become women, women can become men, whatever gender is fluid, doesn't exist so on, there's infinite genders, make up your own pronouns,
[SPEAKER_06]: Like I existed in the 90s, I existed in the 2000s, I existed in the 2010s, and the early 2010s, and no one was even with the most progressive people were not on this bandwagon, and suddenly it's here, and then on the other side, you have people which is probably the majority, where there's just the fear, and there's the silence.
[SPEAKER_06]: There's the silence of just like,
[SPEAKER_06]: In their head, they're probably like, I don't really get this.
[SPEAKER_06]: This doesn't make sense to me, but I don't Yes, I must acquiesce.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, let me at least just shut up and kind of just go you want me to call you she.
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay You want me to call you they okay?
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, just shut up.
[SPEAKER_06]: Don't ask questions.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, and I think you know recently We're kind of coming out of that.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, um, yeah, but
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, like when you talk about the post-truth concept, it helps to frame all of this in a way that is more understandable because it's just been, it's been so bizarre, it's been a very strange
[SPEAKER_00]: And if I, so I have a book about the post truth they call saving truth, my most forthcoming book is called Fake ID.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it basically talks about one, it uses post truth, which I talked about more extensively in our previous book, but Fake ID is about how we are misunderstanding what it means to be human.
[SPEAKER_00]: As a result of post truth thinking, because you said it so
[SPEAKER_00]: We living in this confusion this deeper conversation we're not having about is it tech is it economy is it stressors?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it race relations?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it all these things and the answers?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah But the deeper thing is a little bit more.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think Important the post truth thing is a big part of it, but what we've been telling ourselves For quite a few decades now are two
[SPEAKER_00]: and being told, you should believe both, and they can't possibly both be true, okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first one is you're just a chemical machine.
[SPEAKER_00]: You are a biochemical machine.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we even say it in overt ways, like you, whether it's Daniel Dennett or Sam Harris or whoever else from the so-called new atheists of the past and there are more recent iterations, like Albuquerque or others who might say, there's no soul to you at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're not that the immaterial about the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're just...
[SPEAKER_00]: that's what you are, you're a bag of chemicals.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not sure Alex would say that, that's a zeroy, but those guys have the other thing he's opening.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so, but you're just a machine, and there's nothing immature or ill about you, but the competing claim is you're the god of your own universe.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the whole post truth thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, your other machine or your God, you can have whatever you want, and you dictate reality as you like it, but you're also this machine.
[SPEAKER_00]: Those two things can't both be true, and so you have, I think, especially a younger generation, whether it's Gen Z, the younger and the millennials,
[SPEAKER_00]: who've been hearing this, and hearing this, and in an age of inundation of information, they're hearing all of it all the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the mind can only bounce between two opposite poles of a contradiction, for so long before it just stops and says, I don't get it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, yeah, tech is a big part of it, and Jonathan Heitz's book will tell you,
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, the rise of the smartphone and social media.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yep, but at the symptom, I fundamentally believe the symptom of this desire, the natural desire of humanity to make sense of the world around it, and you cannot simply make sense of two competing opposite claims.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so what happens is the mind sort of snaps.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't mean we're all subtly nuts.
[SPEAKER_00]: What I mean is there's a, there's a, look, a learned helplessness.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not this.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm trying to figure out which one it is and so boom, I'm just done.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't even know who I am anymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't even know what I am anymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is the loss of personhood.
[SPEAKER_00]: And into what I brought up the new book is because I'm trying to address this cultural schizophrenia.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a born of a post-truth culture where we're trying to make these two things and I think you're seeing two cultural forces.
[SPEAKER_00]: gender identity ideology, which I call bioclasm.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you have the word iconoclasm, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So you have an icon.
[SPEAKER_00]: So iconoclasts, the iconoclasts are those people who take something traditional, traditional icons of culture, or of religion, or of society, and they smash them in favor of a new paradigm.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's an iconic last.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, what we're doing now is we're smashing biology and saying it does not matter at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just irrelevant and so bioclasm is the smashing of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what I'm calling the gender ideologies enforced.
[SPEAKER_06]: That's so interesting and I think it's part of why
[SPEAKER_06]: slowly over the past decade, there's been this sort of uniting that people may not have predicted between, let's say, more religious and traditional conservatives and sane, secular people who are like atheistic or kind of like,
[SPEAKER_06]: classical liberal types who may not be religious but they're just sane and they don't think men can turn into women or so on and there's this like they've kind of been the latter have kind of been like kicked out of their traditional tribes, right?
[SPEAKER_06]: Oh yeah, because they refuse to go a lot because they hold firm to biology.
[SPEAKER_06]: Right?
[SPEAKER_00]: They're not Dawkins.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dawkins is not a Christian.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then he holds to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's been de-platformed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, Helen Joyce.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yes, but, but it's easier for them probably to have conversations with like religious conservatives about these particular topics than it is with their fellow atheist progressives, who are fully on board with this gender ideology stuff because it's totally incoherent.
[SPEAKER_06]: And it flies in the face of, again, these are people who, if you go back to the early 2000s or late 90s, you know,
[SPEAKER_06]: their whole thing was just like science.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: Biology.
[SPEAKER_06]: Right.
[SPEAKER_06]: If you cannot like science, typically prove it, then it's not.
[SPEAKER_06]: And so for the, and now they have to do, they're supposed to be, you know, they're being demanded that they do the magic thinking.
[SPEAKER_06]: Otherwise they're big.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's otherwise they're phobic.
[SPEAKER_06]: Otherwise they're all these horrible things.
[SPEAKER_06]: I mean, look at the JK Rowling situation and so on.
[SPEAKER_06]: Oh, yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: And it's,
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't think they would have predicted that one.
[SPEAKER_06]: But I think there's something, to me, there's some quite amusing about it all.
[SPEAKER_06]: There's this idea that, oh, the new atheist movement, like if we can just sort of root out faith and root out religion and anything that's non-scientific or quote unquote superstitious.
[SPEAKER_06]: If we can just root that out, we'll have this like super rational, super peaceful, super tolerant, super free society and instead,
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, you kind of have like what we have and yeah, there are a lot of these What was the term you used to describe this sort of two cultural schizophrenia there multiple ones?
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, that's the thing it's like there's that one you said and then there are so many there are many when it comes to just like
[SPEAKER_06]: the sexes, for example, right?
[SPEAKER_06]: So simultaneously, like if you're a modern American or you're a modern Brit, you're simultaneously supposed to believe that men and women are different, hence even the need for feminism and so on.
[SPEAKER_06]: But also they're essentially the same anything a man can do a woman can do a man can do They're just kind of interchangeable clogs.
[SPEAKER_06]: You're also supposed to believe that and you're also supposed to be in the The gent believe the gender is just a social construct and the different man says that he's a woman or a woman says that she's a man then
[SPEAKER_06]: Actually, you're meant to believe all three, you're meant to believe that if you're a young man, you're supposed to maintain some degree of chivalry and traditional acting like a man and treating women
[SPEAKER_06]: like women and so on, but you're also supposed to be super progressive and egalitarian to the point of like, you know, I don't know.
[SPEAKER_06]: You go on a first date who even is supposed to, supposed to pay, right?
[SPEAKER_06]: If it's the egalitarian feminist view, it's like, well, why should the man pay?
[SPEAKER_06]: But also from the male and the female perspective, there's still this traditional expectation of, well, they use the man.
[SPEAKER_06]: He's supposed to pay, right?
[SPEAKER_06]: Someone will be pushing all this, and then you'll have a woman.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't know whether a woman will be on the train on the New York underground or the London Underground.
[SPEAKER_06]: And, you know, she's mad that no man will give up.
[SPEAKER_06]: She's busy for her.
[SPEAKER_06]: But it's like, well, in my world view, perhaps he should.
[SPEAKER_06]: But in your own world view,
[SPEAKER_06]: the egalitarian and feminist mindset.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's like, well, why should he?
[SPEAKER_06]: Isn't?
[SPEAKER_06]: I thought men and women are.
[SPEAKER_06]: You know, equal, like they're the same.
[SPEAKER_06]: So there's this constant like skits of radios.
[SPEAKER_06]: Because you said it's such a great term where like collectively and individually you're supposed to like hold on to all of these different things and depending on what's expedient at the time and what's depending on the current moment, you're meant to kind of switch between world views, constantly and again, I just think it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It reminds me of the music people.
[SPEAKER_00]: This game my kids introduced me to.
[SPEAKER_00]: They got introduced this card game called Mal.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's based on Mal as I don't.
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, Mal was famous for changing the rules all the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: You never knew what the rules were until you violated one by you know, but you didn't know it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the rule goes like the game was like this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Your luck cards, cards, I'm doubt cards.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the whole goal of the group is to get rid of your cards.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so at the end, the person with the less cards gets the less points, and they win.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sort of like golf.
[SPEAKER_00]: The lower the score, the better you get.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the dealer knows the rules.
[SPEAKER_00]: No one else knows the rules.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so if you violate a rule, you get a card.
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't know what you did.
[SPEAKER_00]: But one of the rules is on spoken rule is that you can't speak, unless you say specific things.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you don't know what to say.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you get a card, you evaluate it at the rule.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're like, why did they get a card?
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't ask why you got a card.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you get it at the card.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you're not told.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't ask for the card.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't ask for why you got the rule.
[SPEAKER_00]: So then you ask again, wait, wait, I don't understand.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you got to figure it out.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the more you don't know the more you get penalized, but then later on, the dealer can change the rules.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's a very frustrating game.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's fun in one sense, but it's kind of fun in the nervous sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're like, this is a little too close to society.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's kind of part of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think society is like that as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: And after a while you just throw up your hand, you're like, I'm just, I'm not playing anymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that results in some, at a car game, it's fun, in life, it's debilitating.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's sort of this learn helplessness where a rat won't know how to get through a maze and press which button to the keeps changing the rules and the rat will literally starve to death because it won't get the food because it doesn't know the rules anymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so just sits and does nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the cultural skits of Frania that I focus on is this one between are you a machine or are you the god of your own universe?
[SPEAKER_00]: But, and that's the broadest term, but all of it, you said I think is another full-time-down-streamer thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so the generous thing I think tries to solve it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the bio-classism, I think tries to solve it.
[SPEAKER_00]: What it says is, you are a god because you can determine what's real.
[SPEAKER_00]: And your body is just either irrelevant, or it's like a Mr.
[SPEAKER_00]: Potato Head.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can change it as you like because you are the God of your own universe.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if anyone who doesn't affirm that is now sort of violating the sanctity of your divinity, so that's the effort to resolve this tension.
[SPEAKER_00]: You are a machine in terms of your body, but your spirit is this thing that can dominate the rest of the world, and you can change your biology as you see fit.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's what I think that one of the reasons why we're so fascinated with this gender question is because it gives in to one, it solves a contradiction, we've been trying to solve.
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't actually solve it, it just tends to solve it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're seeing all the science now about the crazy damage that's been done by this.
[SPEAKER_06]: As if we needed scientific studies for that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know, but but exactly, but now we do have them, whether it's the Cass report or it's the United States NIH report, which was with held for years, because and I quote, I didn't want the data to be weaponized.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the lead researcher would held it even though we knew that all the hormone blockers and all that stuff doesn't help anybody.
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, in fact, it might make it worse.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then various other studies that have just been suppressed on these kind of things or at least ignored.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's an effort to resolve the contradiction but in making the omelet an awful lot of eggs got broke and some of those eggs can't be fixed and we had Chloe Cole on our patty.
[SPEAKER_00]: And she shared the story about how she wasn't suicidal.
[SPEAKER_00]: She didn't have this, like, these problems with, you know, thinking about her life as, like, in a scalable cycle of pain until she started to transition.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then it came later.
[SPEAKER_00]: I quote in the book, Andrea Chu, who is a male, who went through the whole surgery and had the, had the vaginoplasty and everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in an article,
[SPEAKER_00]: The Andrea Chu says, the headline is, my new vagina won't make me happy.
[SPEAKER_00]: and then goes through, at length.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh gosh, how the body thinks it's a wound, it is costly trying to heal it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yep, there's various surgical things that have to be done over the course of Andrea Choose Life to keep this thing in the condition that it's in, calls them hormones, and Chu says, I was never suicidal until after I started this whole thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but then goes ahead and defends the decision as if it was the right one.
[SPEAKER_06]: I wouldn't have been published in the New York Times, otherwise.
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly, exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: But here's the part that gets me on this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is that if I would look at someone with genuine gender dysphoria, and I think genuine dysphoria is a real thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do I think that's what's going on in the culture?
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I think there are very few people with genuine gender dysphoria.
[SPEAKER_00]: But what we want to do, if I'm going to be charitable to anybody on either side of this question.
[SPEAKER_00]: One person says, I want to help these people.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they think the way to help them is to change the body.
[SPEAKER_00]: I would say, I want to help them too, but it's to change the mind to conform to the body.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think this one is destructive.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I think this bioclassic sort of agenda takes advantage of these people's sincerity and then blows it up into this.
[SPEAKER_00]: be your old God.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I don't think that's genuine.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think that's genuine concern, no.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if we have concern for these folks, we want them to do is have their mind and their body match.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's far more obvious to me that changing the body with all this resistance to the change is just evidence of the destructive nature of trying to change the body, changing the mind so there's harmony, and you might not get perfect
[SPEAKER_00]: You might not, but look.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't have perfect congruence in my own life in many, many ways.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't have the body I would like.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know it's much more minor thing, but I got to work on myself mentally in many ways.
[SPEAKER_00]: As a Christian, I believe I'm a sinner, and the apostle Paul says that that which I want to do, I don't do, but that which I don't want to do, I end up doing, who will save me from this wretched body of death.
[SPEAKER_00]: for lack of better term.
[SPEAKER_00]: A dysphoria, but it's a spiritual dysphoria.
[SPEAKER_00]: So every human being is going through this, and I think that the way to fix this is a spiritual, it's a spiritual fix, not a medical fix.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I believe in therapy, and I believe in...
[SPEAKER_00]: these kinds of things, but we're ignoring the spiritual aspect of it because the way to reconcile the U.R.
[SPEAKER_00]: God and U.R.
[SPEAKER_00]: machine paradox is not to say, yes, you are a God that can manipulate the machine.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I think the way to resolve it is to do what Psalm 8 says.
[SPEAKER_00]: Psalm 8 says, what is man, oh God, that you are mindful of him or the son of man that you care for him, you have made him a little less than the heavenly beings, yet crowned him with glory and honor.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you're not the God of your own universe, but you're not a machine, you're the glorious thing in the middle.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if we recognize what that actually is, and what it means to be made in God's image, I think we can solve the contradiction, and I think we can have an anchor for people who don't know the right identity.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: that, and if the data is right, and I think the data is right, shows it to be a social contagion.
[SPEAKER_06]: Oh gosh, 100%.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: That's not even debatable.
[SPEAKER_06]: It really is.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's not even debatable.
[SPEAKER_06]: The whole like studies can be useful.
[SPEAKER_06]: There's a time and place for studies, of course.
[SPEAKER_06]: But again, another thing that is kind of just annoying me about modern culture is this idea that everything requires a study and is like completely unknown until a published study comes out.
[SPEAKER_06]: And it's just like you don't, you can do people not use their eyes and use their ears.
[SPEAKER_06]: Like you can observe things.
[SPEAKER_06]: Even this whole issue we're talking about.
[SPEAKER_06]: Why is it going on in the West?
[SPEAKER_06]: Why isn't this a huge problem here in the UAE and Saudi Arabia and in Oman and all across Africa and in just if it were just like oh This is just a state of humanity and this is something then you will have huge historical evidence for it It'll be happening all over the world at all times.
[SPEAKER_02]: It'll be invasive.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's I mean even I'm sure if you were to like do a map of the incidents of I don't know quote unquote
[SPEAKER_06]: Trans-Drennery does them in you gender dysphoria in youth in the you it'll even be in pockets of the USA Right, it's gonna be predominantly in more liberal cities in more liberal states in more liberal Counties and oh wow suddenly in this particular school There's like 50 quote unquote trans kids.
[SPEAKER_06]: Oh, and then this is conservative one over there's zero and all across like all these African schools Oh, there's zero in across the middle of it.
[SPEAKER_06]: So
[SPEAKER_06]: And what about, again, didn't we exist in 1995, in 2005, in, you know, 20, where, where, where was this all?
[SPEAKER_06]: How is it suddenly?
[SPEAKER_06]: Oh, there's a look.
[SPEAKER_06]: There's a 1,200 percent spike in, obviously it's a social contingent.
[SPEAKER_06]: Why is it affecting certain groups more than others?
[SPEAKER_06]: Why are teenage autistic girls in particular?
[SPEAKER_06]: Like, I don't know 50 times more likely to go through that.
[SPEAKER_06]: Why are it, it's just,
[SPEAKER_06]: Even even I don't even normally break things down by race, but even in a racial thing.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's like, oh, why is it like it seems to be predominantly like middle class and richer like white kids?
[SPEAKER_06]: Why isn't this an epidemic in the black communities and the Latino communities and so on?
[SPEAKER_06]: It's just it's just insane.
[SPEAKER_06]: There was a point you made earlier, which again, it's something that's just if people just use their brains and thought.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, okay.
[SPEAKER_06]: There are many types of
[SPEAKER_06]: dysmorphia that exists.
[SPEAKER_06]: There's anorexia, there's bulimia, there's bigorexia, there's phantom limb syndrome.
[SPEAKER_06]: There's all sorts of things.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't even know the names of all the different types of dysmorphias that exist in all of them.
[SPEAKER_06]: With one exception, we know you treat the mind.
[SPEAKER_06]: You treat the mind.
[SPEAKER_02]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_06]: If I'm going around thinking, I'm able to fly.
[SPEAKER_06]: No one is going to affirm me and say, yeah, actually, you can fly.
[SPEAKER_06]: If you jump out that building, don't worry, either you can just fly.
[SPEAKER_06]: Even if I was walking around saying that, I think I'm actually a white guy.
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm actually Caucasian.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I'm trapped in the rope.
[SPEAKER_06]: People would like this is happened by the way.
[SPEAKER_06]: Oh, yeah, this is happened.
[SPEAKER_06]: They were like the was off You don't identify but people are laughing at it.
[SPEAKER_06]: Oh, they can offended at it Exactly people are offended and then suddenly like you'll have a guy like meet your big man like me big man like you with a beard Oh, I'm a film woman and everyone's like oh, this is a woman
[SPEAKER_06]: If you said that you were a black man, people are going to laugh and look at it crazy, whereas I'd say biologically, you're closer to that than you are to being a woman.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't understand why.
[SPEAKER_06]: I had to go viral on the end.
[SPEAKER_06]: It got millions and millions of views.
[SPEAKER_06]: I was having a debate with a young woman on this whole topic.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I explained to her that,
[SPEAKER_06]: Transracialism is more logically coherent than transgenderism and it is because quote-unquote race is actually a spectrum okay so whereas like every any child who's born
[SPEAKER_06]: boy or girl, all around the world is boy, it's a girl, all through history, it's a boy, it's a girl, okay?
[SPEAKER_06]: But what about race is not binary, right?
[SPEAKER_06]: It's not binary, right?
[SPEAKER_06]: So some of my look at you and be like, oh gosh, I don't actually know like what's your racial ethnic background, like it could be a lot of racial children.
[SPEAKER_06]: Exactly, my own son, you know, he's
[SPEAKER_06]: You know, I'm by blood.
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm Nigerian Ibo specifically.
[SPEAKER_06]: My wife is half Cuban, half Panamanian, actually has some Chinese ancestry and so on.
[SPEAKER_06]: If you go further back like this, so like, you know, my son's a boy, he's a boy.
[SPEAKER_06]: What races he?
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: As he, as he, I don't know, like, he's right back.
[SPEAKER_06]: And that's true of so many people.
[SPEAKER_06]: And so it's like,
[SPEAKER_06]: Surely you know if you take any I don't know Barack Obama people say Barack Obama's a black man He's just as white as he is black.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay, do you to the actual social construct people will say he's black?
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, although he's just as white as he is black But he could I Barack Obama identifying as white or even identifying as Arabic
[SPEAKER_06]: is more coherent and more believable than him identifying his woman, but the former people would say and obviously, right?
[SPEAKER_06]: No, it's not even, you just look at him.
[SPEAKER_06]: Like if you just saw him and he said, oh yeah, I'm Indian, you wouldn't badnilot.
[SPEAKER_06]: If you didn't know who he was and he wasn't badnilot, maybe you said I'm a woman, you'd be like, what?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, just again.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't I don't need studies like this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, well, that is so funny.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's so funny We could put a study common sense as they say isn't so calm.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, the thing with the studies And why I sort of site that added for night them in in in the book is because we've heard this phrase follow the science.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So, without picking up people too much, you have this, you have this creed.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, I don't know if it doesn't happen here, I'm sure it doesn't happen here.
[SPEAKER_00]: But in the States, you'll walk by a house and there'll be a sign up.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'll say, in this house we believe, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's basically the secular creed.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the same thing as the nice and creed.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just, or the apostles' creed, it's just the secular version of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: We love it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Love is love.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And science is real.
[SPEAKER_00]: because the referring to is climate change, of course.
[SPEAKER_00]: But, okay, let's go with it.
[SPEAKER_00]: You believe science is real.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, when this studies show that this kind of treatment is terrible for children, are you going to say the science is real or are you going to say, oh, it's bias and suppressed and should be ignored.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, you know, Lisa Litton comes out with a study on rapid onset gender dysphoria and it is penned by so many people even though the science is valid even the methodology was great.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was peer-to-viewed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nope.
[SPEAKER_00]: We track that from the journal have it republished with some other kind of, you know,
[SPEAKER_00]: Findings or whatever it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought science was real.
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought we were a cool with that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought there was part of your creed for heaven's sake until Because that is quintessentially post truth Feelings and preferences better more than facts and truth because we want to be autonomous and so the reason why I think it's not
[SPEAKER_00]: I shouldn't say it's not so obvious because it isn't one sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: The reason why the obviousness doesn't change in its mind is because autonomy matters more.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is that it was obvious to arrive and you don't eat this.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Supreme Being told you bad things will happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to be with you, but you elevated your preference to be me.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're supposed to be with me, not be me.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're just inherently like this.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a human problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think when it starts to bleed over into actually hurting people, now I have to say something.
[SPEAKER_00]: And stand up for this kind of thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And stand up against the reality collapse.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's a part of the culture cultural moment we're in right now is not as opposed to truth, but post truth is now
[SPEAKER_00]: matured into this reality collapsing thing where we are almost okay with the fakery.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know I think about 1984 and I realize it's overused but when O'Brien is torturing Winston and saying what is 2 plus 2 and Winston says 4 and then he tortures someone until he says 5.
[SPEAKER_00]: O'Brien says you know Winston basically says
[SPEAKER_00]: It can't be anything but four, and he says, no, sometimes it's three, sometimes it's five or Brian says, and he says, why are you torturing me essentially?
[SPEAKER_00]: He says, because Winston, it's not easy to become sane.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so the party says, you're only sane if you do what we say, and I feel like the bio-classism that I'm worried about.
[SPEAKER_00]: is collapsing reality so that you can become same.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, here's the good news.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have hope.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm actually an optimist despite my cultural criticisms.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you see the recent polling, let's come out.
[SPEAKER_00]: You see that there was this huge spike in identification with a gender other than when you were born with, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And then recently in 2025, a huge plummet.
[SPEAKER_00]: No longer that.
[SPEAKER_00]: By half.
[SPEAKER_00]: If it were a natural condition of the human attachment, you wouldn't have that data.
[SPEAKER_00]: You just wouldn't.
[SPEAKER_00]: It very much shows you a social contagion, that's born of this cultural schizophrenia, and an effort to solve the contradiction by affirming your development.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, it goes back to me to the Bible predicted this.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is my argument.
[SPEAKER_00]: My argument is,
[SPEAKER_00]: If a book has divine origin, then it should predict with startling accuracy, the human condition, well before the science catches up.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Bible predicts the human condition with wild accuracy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well before the science caught up, therefore the Bible is a human origin.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is one example.
[SPEAKER_06]: A human origin?
[SPEAKER_00]: Sorry, of divine origin.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for the correction.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, therefore, it's of divine origin.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, human influence, God used human beings to write it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it says some things that we just, we're now catching up to.
[SPEAKER_00]: In so many fields, but this one in particular, I think is, is, is why I think the solution really is a spiritual solution and going to this ancient document.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's why you, I think you do have
[SPEAKER_00]: Young men, especially, but Bible sales in the West, this is cool, are way up in 2025 and young men finally go on to church and they weren't going to... We had a problem with men going to church, they just weren't going on.
[SPEAKER_00]: Women were going, now they tend to be leaving, but the men are going back.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's because they see that it's not easy to become sane.
[SPEAKER_00]: But torturing ourselves socially is not the way to do it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe finding a transcendent root in who you are is the way to become same again.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's one example of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think the reality collapse also bleeds into the technological.
[SPEAKER_00]: But again, I don't think the technological is the problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the human condition is the problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: And our obsession with technology.
[SPEAKER_00]: And a misuse of technology are over-reliance on it with AI and everything else is a symptom of that same thing So that's another branch of a conversation obviously, but I do think that we're in the middle of this reality collapse where While we're on the downswing of the gender issue, and I still think writing about it was worthwhile
[SPEAKER_00]: uh... were on the upswing of the real of the attempt using technology to to resolve the schizophrenia because the gender team didn't work uh... so now we have to refine something else and that thing is artificial intelligence um... and without
[SPEAKER_00]: Blathering on a little bit longer on this one, but I think it's important is so you have this contradiction You're a god and you're a machine artificial intelligence when what I call AI media It's not AI that I'm a type of problem with I actually like AI.
[SPEAKER_00]: You had the founder of Siri at a mum at him Try to try on on your show a little while ago
[SPEAKER_00]: and talked about some of the wonders that AI is allowing us to do the protein-folding thing he talked about.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm like, oh, my goodness, it does.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's amazing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, I know a lot about AI, but there's something I don't know good for the room.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I'm commenting on the cultural impact of the whole thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So when you write a book about AI, you run a very serious risk that by the time it goes to publisher, it's out of date.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, that's why I wrote a cultural impact book, not a technical impact book.
[SPEAKER_00]: But what I've noticed is with the artificial intelligence issue, when I'm calling AI Mania, is not that AI is bad.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's that human beings,
[SPEAKER_00]: 10 towards certain behaviors that AI can augment and sort of ruin in some ways as a tool It can benefit us greatly and I'm a big I use it all the time.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah
[SPEAKER_00]: But I do worry about us.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think the problem is the silicon of AI.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the problem is the soul of the humans are using it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So to me, the schizophrenia is your agada, your machine.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then we invent the seemingly godlike machine.
[SPEAKER_00]: that says, you can be a machine and still be got.
[SPEAKER_00]: It can know everything, and it can do all these things.
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, the transhumanist, like Kurt's wild, Rothblad, at least Bohan, and all these folks, are talking about one day we'll achieve the singularity and we'll have artificial intelligence that will achieve and then surpass human level intelligence.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then we'll merge with it in some, I love your how they propose that our immaterial consciousness
[SPEAKER_00]: hardware, yeah, but even then, if it's a brain ship, they're talking about immortality.
[SPEAKER_00]: Rothblatt, for example, Martin Rothblatt talks about achieving immortality through download and Kurzweil talks about this.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, here's how I know the AI mania that is transhumanism is trying to solve the contradiction.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ray Kurzweil was asked in documentary called Transcended Man.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's asked the question, is there a God?
[SPEAKER_00]: He says, if you ask me if there's a God, I would say not yet.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not bad.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's quite a statement.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, man, you know, to tie a lot of these things together.
[SPEAKER_06]: Something that I've concluded in my hundreds, if not thousands of conversations and just connecting with so many people online and offline is, yeah, I think something that's going on a lot in the modern world is this constant search for solutions to problems that aren't actually problems.
[SPEAKER_06]: Because sometimes I just see people running in some direction and trying to do this and trying to do that, and this, and I often come back to just like, what's the problem you're trying to solve?
[SPEAKER_06]: Like what's the actual problem?
[SPEAKER_06]: And this doesn't even have to get into tech things.
[SPEAKER_06]: This can be about like some of the DEI stuff, for example, when it's like, oh, we need to get, you know, we need this in this C-suite exact in this company, we have, you know,
[SPEAKER_06]: 75% of the people on the board are men and we need to do this and this is I'm like What's the problem you're trying to solve?
[SPEAKER_06]: What's the problem?
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay at 75 the problem is it 75% man and Yeah So what's the problem?
[SPEAKER_06]: What's what's what's the problem?
[SPEAKER_06]: Like is it a company?
[SPEAKER_06]: What is the problem?
[SPEAKER_06]: Are those the best people?
[SPEAKER_06]: Is it that those people suck?
[SPEAKER_06]: Is the problem that you know?
[SPEAKER_06]: Your profits are tanking like no, but it has to be 50 why like imagine in sport
[SPEAKER_06]: You used to play basketball, you played also, imagine if you expect every sports team to perfectly represent the ratios of gender and race and ethnicity and social class of the society, nobody would expect that.
[SPEAKER_06]: That would be insane.
[SPEAKER_06]: The NBA NFL, I think, are over 70% black men make up what?
[SPEAKER_06]: 6%.
[SPEAKER_06]: of the US population, and if someone was like, oh, we need to get, you know, the NBA should be like only 6% percent, 6% black, and I don't know, 55% white, and people would be like,
[SPEAKER_06]: What do you even, yeah, even the most like a liberal progressive prison be like what like that, that's not that's all of a sudden they're super meritocratic, right?
[SPEAKER_06]: And it happens and just all of these different things you're running in this direction, all of these things with AI and we're making this and we're making this and we want to have AI companions and we want to make this.
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm like, what's the problem you are trying to solve?
[SPEAKER_06]: Because as far as I'm concerned with technology and I love technology, technology does great things, right?
[SPEAKER_06]: I can see where we are.
[SPEAKER_06]: I know why this mic exists.
[SPEAKER_06]: I know why this was invented.
[SPEAKER_06]: I know why cameras were invented.
[SPEAKER_06]: I know why the internet, all of these are very useful tools.
[SPEAKER_06]: But your people are pushing for certain things.
[SPEAKER_06]: And it's like, what's the issue you're trying to fix?
[SPEAKER_06]: Like, as far as I'm concerned with some of these applications,
[SPEAKER_06]: all you're doing is creating new problems.
[SPEAKER_06]: Sure, sometimes, you know, a solution's always going to come with trade-offs, right?
[SPEAKER_06]: So I know why the smartphone was invented.
[SPEAKER_06]: I know why social media was invented, and there's upsides and there's downsides, and you know, we can have conversations about what they are, but they do solve problems, for sure.
[SPEAKER_06]: But then with some of these other things, I'm just like, this thing's not a problem to begin.
[SPEAKER_06]: You're going to create a huge problem here.
[SPEAKER_06]: be not solving anything, right?
[SPEAKER_06]: Artificial wounds.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: We need to make artificial.
[SPEAKER_06]: Why?
[SPEAKER_06]: Are women suddenly no longer able to conceive and carry and give birth to children?
[SPEAKER_06]: If so, I can say, okay, we need some artificial wound intervention to keep the human species going.
[SPEAKER_06]: But no, you just, you just want to do this because you can't, how we want to make human pig hybrid for what?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: Why?
[SPEAKER_06]: Why are you trying to, you see what I mean?
[SPEAKER_06]: I can see many ways that this goes horribly, horribly wrong.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: But even if it goes right.
[SPEAKER_06]: What problem did you solve, like, yeah, what are we doing here?
[SPEAKER_00]: And we could articulate, like, various, like, let's say the artificial womb thing, someone wants to say that again, to play sort of, not devil's advocate, but to make sure we steal man, the argument starts responding to.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some will could say, well, women shouldn't be beholden to pregnancy so that they can pursue careers and all that stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we're solving the problem of women having the opportunity to leave and all that stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, well,
[SPEAKER_00]: That's biology.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, that's the way this works, but we can solve that other ways, you know, that kind of thing.
[SPEAKER_06]: Also for what percentage of the population are you solving?
[SPEAKER_06]: And that's the 7% of women who like, you don't want that?
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: You see what I mean.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's such a minority.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, that there might be of that tone.
[SPEAKER_00]: One comedian who talked about the hand dryer and the automatic sync in public bathroom.
[SPEAKER_00]: like you put your hand on the water like it was just really a problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: We unable to actually turn these things and then the hand dryer comes out and or the the towel comes down because you can't pull Like what is this this is a solution to a problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: No one has and there are plenty of things like that I'll tell you what's interesting is that
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, sort of like to talk about some details that come out after you start writing a book.
[SPEAKER_00]: So when I was writing the book, I was thinking about one of the problems that would result from AI Mania is that we would over-rely our unofficial intelligence and so on, our effort to achieve God's status, we would actually start to see our humanity to the algorithms.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tamas, Tromerope, music, talks about this in I-Human.
[SPEAKER_00]: I talked about this in the book, and then, you know, the book goes to the publisher,
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I see the study from MIT.
[SPEAKER_00]: You probably saw this, but the study shows there's two studies.
[SPEAKER_00]: One was just MIT at the Media Lab and another one was Media Lab and open AI.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the study shows that human beings, who use chatty PT in a regular basis, start to lose memory, start to lose creativity, and they have a hard time getting it back.
[SPEAKER_00]: They start to have a loneliness dependency, especially when they use the voice feature.
[SPEAKER_00]: They start to have this loneliness epidemic.
[SPEAKER_00]: People who use replica and paradigm, these apps that become their AI chat bots, they have tremendous loneliness problems.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's up to realize something is that, you know, I know lawyer when I was doing commercial litigation.
[SPEAKER_00]: I did a lot of business stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the things that I noticed when I was doing it in case of any law of mergers, mergers and acquisitions so that there's no such thing as a merger of equals.
[SPEAKER_00]: It just doesn't happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever choose, simply equal companies, what of them becomes dominant and the dominant culture is the one that company becomes.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's always an invariable law of business.
[SPEAKER_00]: And transhumanism is all because idea that we can merge with technology, go from being machines to becoming godlike if we achieve this murder.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, if this data from the MIT study that shows that when we overlay an LLM for ad that's safe, not even like an implanted or a brace, but we rely on LLM to write our essays for us and to do all the creative thinking for us and to create images of all this, but us doing it.
[SPEAKER_00]: We lose cognitive ability, cognitive function.
[SPEAKER_00]: We go into what they call cognitive debt.
[SPEAKER_00]: all this happens.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is happening now.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're losing our sense of humanity.
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you imagine if we merge with technology and it does everything for us?
[SPEAKER_00]: We're gonna see our humanity in a single 10% because human beings are path of least resistance creatures.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's why the number of people who are physically fit is a lot lower than the people who are not.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because we don't like resistance training because we are inherently path of least resistance.
[SPEAKER_00]: Back to Albany, this is the quick way
[SPEAKER_00]: God probably would have taught you this, under the guidance in the Garden of Eden, but either of the good fix.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is, again, but it was them.
[SPEAKER_00]: We go for it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this study is just showing us that we've known this all along, of course, who has.
[SPEAKER_00]: So again, technology is great.
[SPEAKER_05]: We just kale high in it to be our savior.
[SPEAKER_05]: We have lots of the conceder.
[SPEAKER_05]: We really don't.
[SPEAKER_05]: And again,
[SPEAKER_05]: studies for things that are obvious to any more in this venture because how well do we remember fund numbers now.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: How well do we remember driving directions.
[SPEAKER_05]: Abdulman, it's been wonderful talking to you about you see all of these different subjects here.
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, I could talk to you.
[SPEAKER_05]: I know we could go on for hours and hours and go in depth on all of these different things.
[SPEAKER_05]: But before we close out today, where can people find volleyball online and court and they, um,
[SPEAKER_05]: where will they deal the edit book?
[SPEAKER_00]: So you can find more about us at embrace the truths that Boarji, we have a litany of information and resources, whether it's written or our videos and that kind of thing, we have a podcast called All Rise, our YouTube as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: So look up all right with the OptiBerry.
[SPEAKER_00]: Look, of course, I have the social media handles of the various things.
[SPEAKER_00]: You haven't got this up, is it just at Abjumari?
[SPEAKER_00]: It is, until you get the Instagram, because if you add Abjumari, you get my cousin.
[SPEAKER_00]: you have to get at obumerary one two.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you'll get me on Instagram.
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, then the book is set to be released in February of 1226, but it is available for pre-ordered them actually on every side of other places.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it has a thing you want to call fake ID, how I did any ideology and AI are collapsing reality and what to do about it.