Speaker 1: Understand the thinking atheist. It's not a person, it's a symbol,
Speaker 1: an idea.
Speaker 2: The population of atheists this country is going through the.
Speaker 1: Rule, rejecting faith, pursuing knowledge, challenging the sacred. If I
Speaker 1: tell the truth, it's because I tell the truth, not.
Speaker 2: Because I put my hand on a book and made
Speaker 2: a wish.
Speaker 1: And working together for a more rational world.
Speaker 2: Take the risk of thinking. Feel so much more happiness.
Speaker 2: Truth Fusian wisdom will come to you that way.
Speaker 1: Assume nothing, question everything, and start thinking. This is the
Speaker 1: Thinking Atheist podcast hosted by Seth Andrews.
Speaker 2: BI popular Demand. This is the audio and I have
Speaker 2: LinkedIn the description box the video from my July the
Speaker 2: eleventh events with No Illusions, both of us on stage
Speaker 2: at Anderson Center, Cincinnati, Ohio. We had a great crowd
Speaker 2: and a great time, and I'll take this chance to
Speaker 2: do a shameless plug. I'm taking this relative format to
Speaker 2: Fort Worth for August twenty ninth, the Unholy Trinity Reunion
Speaker 2: tour with me and arn Raw Matt Delahunty. Obviously, it's
Speaker 2: going to be wildly different because we're all doing our
Speaker 2: own material. I've got fresh stuff that I'm taking in
Speaker 2: Matt and arn have their own vibe and everything is
Speaker 2: going to be different, but the framing is going to
Speaker 2: be kind of the same. Three hours, jam packed full
Speaker 2: of good stuff, and there are still tickets for Fort
Speaker 2: Worth if you want to go. Unholy Trinity dot net
Speaker 2: is the website Unholy Trinity dot nets. Here we go.
Speaker 2: The audio from the show on the eleventh of July
Speaker 2: at Anderson Center in Cincinnati. Thank you so much for
Speaker 2: coming out today. How many people lied about where you
Speaker 2: were going? Yes, I see that hand, Yes, I see
Speaker 2: that hand. I have never had the opportunity to be
Speaker 2: on stage at the same time with no illusions the
Speaker 2: scathing atheist. But it's an honor to be here, and
Speaker 2: it's I'm so glad you guys came. You drove in
Speaker 2: from a deep South part of Georgia. I did, like,
Speaker 2: were there red flags everywhere?
Speaker 3: Trump flags and abortion billboards as far as the eye
Speaker 3: can see? And how's a I kid you not Trump
Speaker 3: barber shop in case, in case you want your hair
Speaker 3: to look like tunnel trumps.
Speaker 2: Today's going to be a pot pourri of fun stuff.
Speaker 2: I get a chance to speak at a lot of events,
Speaker 2: but for this one, I get a chance to kind
Speaker 2: of produce a little bit and mix things up. So
Speaker 2: we're going to each give, for lack of a better word,
Speaker 2: of formal presentation, and then we're going to come back.
Speaker 2: We've got a segment where we're going to read some
Speaker 2: of our weirdest and wackiest hate mail, and yes, you
Speaker 2: should prepare yourself for that. We brought some fun stuff
Speaker 2: to give away, some random prizes, some good Heathen swag
Speaker 2: that you're going to be able to take with you,
Speaker 2: and oh, you're all about to free stuff you transactionable.
Speaker 2: And then the last portion of the show, we're in
Speaker 2: the last half, we're going to do a lot of
Speaker 2: speaking to you. We have a roving microphone and we're
Speaker 2: going to bounce around and just have a conversation. Not
Speaker 2: necessarily doesn't have to be a question, but whatever's on
Speaker 2: your mind, if you want to make a comment, you
Speaker 2: want to be a part of a discussion with us,
Speaker 2: We're going to kind of pinball around and know it's
Speaker 2: an honor brother beyond all. How many podcasts are you
Speaker 2: on right now?
Speaker 3: Regularly five?
Speaker 2: I'm on pretty much one and I can't keep up.
Speaker 2: He's a superman. He's a superman. He's going to go
Speaker 2: first on the roster today, and so I'm just going
Speaker 2: to go ahead and introduce my friend. He is someone who,
Speaker 2: like many of us who are activists, and I think
Speaker 2: many of you, we all have a lot of us
Speaker 2: have an activist nature. We saw something, we heard something
Speaker 2: that sets something off in us, and we're like, I
Speaker 2: have to speak. What can I do one of my gifts?
Speaker 2: How can I participate and be a part of the conversation.
Speaker 2: And this guy did that very thing. I won't tell
Speaker 2: this whole story, but he has become someone who mixes
Speaker 2: smart and humor in a way that I have come
Speaker 2: to really admire. And it's an honor to be on stage,
Speaker 2: and I'm going to give the stage over to him.
Speaker 2: Ladies and gentlemen, no illusions, they do.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for coming out, braving the chili
Speaker 3: to be here Cincinnati, because I'm so happy to be
Speaker 3: and I'm so nervous as well, because it is intimidating
Speaker 3: as hell to share the stage with Seth Andrews.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I mean, for one thing, he's done
Speaker 3: like seven million events like this in his career. I've
Speaker 3: done like seven. But it's not just that it's also
Speaker 3: the voice, my God, I feel like I should.
Speaker 4: I feel like you should come out and do my
Speaker 4: whole talk like this, and then when Seth comes out,
Speaker 4: he'll feel the need to be even basier and sexier.
Speaker 5: Right, what would that even sound like?
Speaker 3: Can the human ear pick that up? But we can't.
Speaker 3: That would risk ripping a hole in the fabricous space time.
Speaker 3: And so I'm just gonna talk in my normal voice,
Speaker 3: and I'm gonna do a talk for you that I
Speaker 3: call how to die like an atheist.
Speaker 5: I'm very deceptive title. I know you hear that, and
Speaker 5: you're like, You're not dead?
Speaker 2: What the hell you know?
Speaker 3: And I'm not. I'll admit it. I am not now,
Speaker 3: nor have I ever been dead. I haven't even done
Speaker 3: that thing that's not dying that people call dying where
Speaker 3: your heart stops momentarily, but then it starts again and
Speaker 3: the inner and in the interim, either the ghost that
Speaker 3: drives your body flew away to heaven and met it
Speaker 3: savior it's Graham and all it's lost puppies, or you
Speaker 3: had drug induced dreams based on cultural expectations and then
Speaker 3: woke up in the hospital that definitely gave you drugs
Speaker 3: where one of those two things happened but they hadn't.
Speaker 3: But none of that shit's happened to me. Well, I've
Speaker 3: had drug induced streams, but none of the other shit
Speaker 3: has that happened to me? So where do I get
Speaker 3: off telling other people how to die? Well, it so
Speaker 3: happens that at one point in my life I came
Speaker 3: so very close to dying that my brain could not
Speaker 3: tell the difference between what it was experiencing and actually dying,
Speaker 3: and so it formulated what it had every reason to
Speaker 3: believe were its final thoughts. And that's actually what I
Speaker 3: want to talk to you guys about. I want to
Speaker 3: talk you about those final thoughts because as atheists, we
Speaker 3: hear a lot about our final thoughts, right, A lot
Speaker 3: of the times, a lot of predictions of the last
Speaker 3: things we'll be thinking. Usually it's people predicting that we're
Speaker 3: going to be thinking about how right they were in
Speaker 3: the argument that we're presently having with them. Right, we're
Speaker 3: going to think about how we should have spent more
Speaker 3: of our life loving Jesus, or we should have spent
Speaker 3: our lives or we would be afraid, right, because we
Speaker 3: don't know where we're going after we die. And we're
Speaker 3: afraid that it might be hell, the hell of their religion,
Speaker 3: not the others for some reason. But most often, of course,
Speaker 3: what we're told is we're going to be changing our
Speaker 3: minds at that last second, that our last thought is
Speaker 3: going to be something along the lines of, oh shit,
Speaker 3: I had it wrong, Jesus, accept you as my Lord
Speaker 3: and savior. Amen. And when you're presented with that argument,
Speaker 3: it's hard to argue back because you don't know, right,
Speaker 3: You don't know that. You probably know better than some
Speaker 3: asshole on Twitter, but you don't know what you're going
Speaker 3: to be thinking about what when you die. You never
Speaker 3: died before, and you're a rationalist, you demand evidence. Well
Speaker 3: that's where I come in, because I've had final thoughts,
Speaker 3: and I'll tell you write in advance they had nothing
Speaker 3: to do with the afterlife or Jesus or any of
Speaker 3: that shit.
Speaker 5: Spoiler alert.
Speaker 3: Now, I will tell you what I would the last
Speaker 3: thoughts were, but I have to get you there slowly.
Speaker 3: I got to tell you my story. So twenty twenty three,
Speaker 3: I had a heart attack. It wasn't a very good
Speaker 3: heart attack, both in the sense that I didn't do
Speaker 3: a very good job of having it and also in
Speaker 3: the sense that it didn't do a very good job
Speaker 3: of attacking my heart. My heart's fine now, thanks for asking,
Speaker 3: but so and luckily for me, my heart attack came
Speaker 3: with a good story. Because when you have a heart
Speaker 3: attack or something like that happens, so you got to
Speaker 3: tell the story. People will constantly ask you, know, what
Speaker 3: was it like to have a heart attack? And I
Speaker 3: feel like for a lot of people, it's a pretty
Speaker 3: boring story. Right, somebody had to have a heart attack
Speaker 3: just sitting in their living room, right, So what was
Speaker 3: it like? Well, I was sitting in my living room
Speaker 3: and I was watching ice road truckers and I thought, shit,
Speaker 3: that ain't right. So and then you gotta spend the
Speaker 3: rest of your like dressing that up, trying to make
Speaker 3: it a more interesting story, because everybody's asking you.
Speaker 5: To tell my heart attack.
Speaker 3: Luckily for me and for you, because I'm about to
Speaker 3: tell you the story if my heart attack came with
Speaker 3: a good story. Started in Las Vegas, to travel two
Speaker 3: thousand miles. There were vampires in it, troll Gordon Ramsay,
Speaker 3: two old ladies forcibly manscaping me while doing shtick. That's
Speaker 3: what we call foreshadowing. In the business right there. So
Speaker 3: let's start in Vegas where the heart attack started. So
Speaker 3: for years, me and my buddies, we want to do
Speaker 3: a show in Las Vegas. Heathan, right, Eli Bostic and me,
Speaker 3: we wanted to do a live show in Vegas because
Speaker 3: that sounds cool, right, live from Vegas.
Speaker 5: Sold out show in Las Vegas. That sounds awesome.
Speaker 3: It feels like it made it when you do that.
Speaker 5: That's hard to do, though.
Speaker 3: It turns out that Vegas is a really hard time
Speaker 3: to set up a live show in because it's really
Speaker 3: hard to rent a theater. There's a lot of demand
Speaker 3: on the theaters and they don't want to rent to
Speaker 3: a place to an event that's going to do a
Speaker 3: one night show.
Speaker 5: That's not entirely unusual for us.
Speaker 3: It might supreasure to find out that there are a
Speaker 3: number of cities in America that don't have robust theater
Speaker 3: rental sectors of their economy. So when we can't find
Speaker 3: a theater, usually we'll use a hotel, convention space. Those
Speaker 3: serve our purposes as well. Unfortunately, in Vegas, those are
Speaker 3: just as much of a premium as theaters. So it
Speaker 3: took a while. It took almost two years to find
Speaker 3: a place that we could host us. Finally, the Flamingo
Speaker 3: Casino and Hotel said they had space for us on
Speaker 3: October twenty eighth, which was one of the dates that
Speaker 3: we had sort of carved out as our availability, and
Speaker 3: they said, you can do your show at our hotel,
Speaker 3: but you can't tell people that you're at the Flamingo.
Speaker 3: And I'm like, can we give them a clue because
Speaker 3: they have to get there right And the guy says, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 3: you misunderstand. You can tell your audience that you're at
Speaker 3: the Flamingo. I'm like, okay, who else what I tell
Speaker 3: except the people that I talked to. He goes, no, no, no,
Speaker 3: you don't get. You don't get. What I'm saying is
Speaker 3: you can't say that you're live at the Flamingo. I says, oh, okay, okay.
Speaker 3: So I can say that we're live, and I can
Speaker 3: say that we're at the Flamingo. I just can't say
Speaker 3: we're live at the Flamingo. He says yeah. I said,
Speaker 3: so we'd have to leave a pause, and he goes,
Speaker 3: it would have to be a pretty big pause.
Speaker 5: I said, don't worry.
Speaker 3: My co host's excel at leaving pretty big pauses. I
Speaker 3: left that joking so I could tell where SATs listeners were.
Speaker 2: What is he talking?
Speaker 3: It's a bit on our show. We pause, I'd say
Speaker 3: it sounds like a shit bit. It's it works. You
Speaker 3: gotta you had to be there. So we do our
Speaker 3: show at the Flamingo and it was a great time.
Speaker 3: We had a great show there. And when we go
Speaker 3: to cool cities like Las Vegas or Cincinnati, will always
Speaker 3: build in an extra tourist day afterwards. Right, well, Eli, Well,
Speaker 3: because he's got a kid, he's gotta go home. But
Speaker 3: me and Heath we hung out an extra day in
Speaker 3: Vegas and a friend of mine New Float all the
Speaker 3: way in from Greece to do the show or to
Speaker 3: see the show. He said, I want to take you
Speaker 3: to fancy dinner tonight. And I said, God's trying to
Speaker 3: stop the show. He always does this. We might need
Speaker 3: an art to get out of here. Don't worry, that's
Speaker 3: my namesake. So so so anyway, so where was I
Speaker 3: was in Vegas?
Speaker 5: Wasn't I?
Speaker 3: Yeah, we were going out for okay, So he said,
Speaker 3: I want to take you to fancy dinner. I so
Speaker 3: that's very sweet of you. I'm not really a fancy
Speaker 3: day though. I didn't like bring a suit in time
Speaker 3: with me because I don't own one, and he says,
Speaker 3: he says, no, I don't worry. I know a good place.
Speaker 5: It's it's casual, it's a it's a Gordon Ramsey restaurant.
Speaker 3: I told you he'd be here, he says, And it's
Speaker 3: it's you can just kind of come as you are.
Speaker 3: And I'm like, oh, that's awesome, I said, I'll go,
Speaker 3: of course, I said, I don't really know the menu.
Speaker 5: Have fancy places, though, so you might have to tell
Speaker 5: me what shit is.
Speaker 2: He says.
Speaker 3: Don't worry. They've got a beef Wellington that you'll love.
Speaker 3: I said, that's, for example. I don't know what that is,
Speaker 3: he said. And it's like a it's like a fancy
Speaker 3: hot pocket. I said.
Speaker 5: Now you're speaking my language.
Speaker 3: And so we go out for fancy hot pockets at
Speaker 3: this Gordon Ramsey restaurant. But here's the thing. And if
Speaker 3: you're never into Vegas you might not know this, but
Speaker 3: in Vegas you can't just fucking go anywhere. It doesn't
Speaker 3: work like that in Vegas, in Cincinnati, anywhere else in
Speaker 3: the damn country. If you're in one place and you
Speaker 3: want to be another place.
Speaker 2: You just go there.
Speaker 3: You just get in your car or friend's car, you
Speaker 3: get an ub or whatever, and at the end of
Speaker 3: that trip, you're in the damn place that you wanted
Speaker 3: to be. That's not how Vegas works, because everything that
Speaker 3: you want to do in Vegas is part of one gigantic, infinite,
Speaker 3: subterranean labyrinth. The casinos and minuteturs and province bosses you
Speaker 3: got to fight your way through. So we're heading over
Speaker 3: to this resturance and Caesar's Palace. We're in the Flamingos.
Speaker 3: It's like a mile walk or something like that. And
Speaker 3: along the way, I find that I'm running out of breath.
Speaker 3: And that's really unusual for me. I'm a hiker. I
Speaker 3: like to take long walks, so but I just actually
Speaker 3: have to stop and catch my breath along the way.
Speaker 3: And this is the main reason I wanted to do
Speaker 3: this talk today. Hey, if that ever happens to you,
Speaker 3: If normally you can breathe and now you can't, go
Speaker 3: to the fucking hospital, doesn't seem like the kind of
Speaker 3: thing you'd have to tell people to do. But apparently
Speaker 3: somebody needed to tell me so I'm passing that news along,
Speaker 3: but I didn't think too much of it at the time.
Speaker 3: We walked on.
Speaker 5: We went.
Speaker 3: We had our fancy hot pockets. They were delicious, now
Speaker 3: that I think about it, ultra rare beef. Probably not
Speaker 3: great food to eat while you're having a heart attack,
Speaker 3: but if it had been my last meal, I would.
Speaker 5: Have chosen wisely.
Speaker 3: So anyway, so we have our fan and I feel
Speaker 3: fine then because I'm sitting down right. But then on
Speaker 3: the way back, all of a sudden, every hundred yards
Speaker 3: or so, I have to stop and I have to
Speaker 3: catch my breath again. And at this point I'm like, okay,
Speaker 3: something's wrong with me. So I asked my phone. I'm like,
Speaker 3: what's wrong with me? And my Phone's like, you're having
Speaker 3: a fucking heart attack, man, And I'm like, no, that's
Speaker 3: not it, because come on, that doesn't make any I'm
Speaker 3: forty seven years old, I'm not overweight, I like to
Speaker 3: exercise fairly regularly. There's no history of heart disease in
Speaker 3: my family. I didn't have high cholesterol or anything. It's
Speaker 3: something like that can't be Plus, I'm the main character.
Speaker 3: It wouldn't make sense for me to have a heart attack.
Speaker 3: At this point in this ya, I have such bad
Speaker 3: main character syndrome. This is true.
Speaker 5: The first time I ever heard that term.
Speaker 3: A buddy of mine says, well, you know, I have
Speaker 3: really bad main character syndrome. And the first thought in
Speaker 3: my head, the first thing that occurred to me, was well,
Speaker 3: if anybody here has main character syndrome, So I thought,
Speaker 3: I can't be a heart attack. So I rephrased the question.
Speaker 3: I said, what could this be? That isn't a heart attack,
Speaker 3: which is a really stupid way to phrase the question.
Speaker 3: But when you phrase it like that, the answer is
Speaker 3: fairly obvious. It's a panic attack, right. The symptoms are
Speaker 3: fairly similar. People very often show up at the hospital
Speaker 3: thinking they're having a heart attack when they're having a
Speaker 3: panic attack. It didn't occur to me that the corollary
Speaker 3: of people not showing up at the hospital because they're
Speaker 3: having a heart attack and thinking there I'm in a
Speaker 3: panic attack must also be true. But I never had
Speaker 3: a panic attack before. I'd heard a lot about him
Speaker 3: that sounded about right, So I said, that's it. It's
Speaker 3: my inaugural panic attack, and hey, what a city to
Speaker 3: have it in, right, Las Vegas is like if a
Speaker 3: panic attack was a city. So so he said, all right,
Speaker 3: having a heart attack or having a panic attack rather.
Speaker 3: So I go up to my room and I do
Speaker 3: the dumbest thing I've ever done in my life.
Speaker 5: I go to sleep.
Speaker 3: Yeah, fifty to fifty chance you wake up from that shit.
Speaker 3: But I did. I did wake up, obviously, and I
Speaker 3: felt all right, felt all right when I was in
Speaker 3: the shower, felt at right when I was packing up
Speaker 3: the room, felt at right on.
Speaker 5: The uber, on the way over to the airport. Get
Speaker 5: to the airport.
Speaker 3: Now I gotta walk again, and immediately every hundred yard
Speaker 3: I'm stopping and catching my breath.
Speaker 5: Try to go through airport security.
Speaker 3: Chasing away a heart attack by naming three things I
Speaker 3: can see in three things I can feel with three
Speaker 3: things I can hear.
Speaker 5: Didn't work.
Speaker 3: So now I get to the airport and I realized, okay,
Speaker 3: this it can't be a panic attack. It's been fifteen
Speaker 3: hours now, right, that doesn't make any sense. But I
Speaker 3: didn't think that I was having a heart attack at
Speaker 3: that moment, because and this is I'm gonna admit how stupid.
Speaker 3: Some of you probably have the impression that I'm a
Speaker 3: smart person. Because I play one on the podcast. I'm not,
Speaker 3: and I'm gonna prove that to you right now. At
Speaker 3: that moment, I thought something was seriously wrong to my
Speaker 3: with me. But I also thought, well, it's it's not.
Speaker 5: A heart attack.
Speaker 3: And I thought that because I did not know what
Speaker 3: a heart attack was. I know, that's how so stupid, right.
Speaker 3: Forty seven year old man says he didn't know what
Speaker 3: a heart attack was. But surprise, surprise, I think a
Speaker 3: lot of you probably don't know what a heart attack
Speaker 3: is either, because I've told this to a lot of
Speaker 3: people and a lot of people are like, oh shit,
Speaker 3: that's a heart attack. See. Here's the thing. Everything I
Speaker 3: knew about a heart attack I learned from TV and movies.
Speaker 3: And I know you can't trust TV and movies when
Speaker 3: it comes to medical ship, but I thought they had
Speaker 3: the idea of what a heart attack was.
Speaker 5: Correct.
Speaker 3: So here's a heart attack in a movie or on TV.
Speaker 3: At the beginning of the scene, the guy looked, and
Speaker 3: it's always a guy. The guy looks at his arm,
Speaker 3: you know, feels at it or whatever otherwise indicates that
Speaker 3: there's some numbness in it or something like that. And
Speaker 3: then sometime later he'll grab that arm and he'll go
Speaker 3: and he'll fall over right. Usually they'll do it a
Speaker 3: little better than I just did it. They're professional actress, though,
Speaker 3: And so I always thought that was a heart attack.
Speaker 3: This that's not a heart attack. That's cardiac arrest. That's
Speaker 3: a different thing, right, A heart attack can lead to
Speaker 3: cardiac arrest. But most of them don't. I'm about four
Speaker 3: out of five of them don't. You can have cardiac
Speaker 3: arrest without having a heart attack. So I didn't think
Speaker 3: I'm having a heart attack. I thought I'm having the
Speaker 3: warning signs that a heart attack is imminent. But I
Speaker 3: didn't want to have it in Vegas. That'd be a
Speaker 3: big pain in the ass. We'd already checked out of
Speaker 3: our hotel room, all right, that airplane flight in a
Speaker 3: couple hours. I'd have to rebook that fear fear where
Speaker 3: my wife would stay, and be a whole pain in
Speaker 3: the ask.
Speaker 5: So I thought I'll fly home and have my heart
Speaker 5: attack there.
Speaker 3: So I bumped the going to sleep thing down to
Speaker 3: number two and did the new dumbest thing I'd ever done.
Speaker 3: I got on an airplane while having a heart attack,
Speaker 3: flew two thousand miles.
Speaker 5: I get home.
Speaker 3: Well, I'm not home, because you know, the airplanes don't
Speaker 3: drop you off there. I got to Jacksonville, Florida, which
Speaker 3: is the nearest major airport to my house. Still an
Speaker 3: hour and twenty minutes or so home, So we drove
Speaker 3: back to my house.
Speaker 5: I let my wife drive. I'm not that stupid, I guess.
Speaker 3: So we got back home, and then, of course, the
Speaker 3: very first thing I did was post the episode for
Speaker 3: the live show that we did in Vegas, because that
Speaker 3: the patrons were waiting, you know, and you guys are
Speaker 3: more important than my heart, apparently, So I posted that episode.
Speaker 5: And I turned to my wife. I said, I think
Speaker 5: I need to.
Speaker 3: Go to the hospital. She says, you think. She had
Speaker 3: been suggesting as much for a while. By now it's
Speaker 3: after midnight. So we go to the hospital.
Speaker 5: And here's the thing. If you're paying attention to the calendar. Here,
Speaker 5: I told you the.
Speaker 3: Show was on October twenty eighth, The fancy hot pockets
Speaker 3: were on October twenty ninth, the flight home was on
Speaker 3: October thirtieth.
Speaker 5: It's now after midnight, which means it's Halloween.
Speaker 3: And with all this shit that was going on in
Speaker 3: my head, I didn't realize that until a fucking vampire
Speaker 3: walks into my hotel or my hospital room. The orderlies
Speaker 3: and the nurses were showing up in costume at this point,
Speaker 3: right for the holiday, and the phlebotomists, right all the phlebotomists,
Speaker 3: the ones that come and get your blood every fifteen minutes,
Speaker 3: man all addressed as vampires, which I thought was really
Speaker 3: really clever. I mentioned it on Facebook and a far
Speaker 3: smarter than me friend dubbed them nurse for Ratu, such
Speaker 3: a good line.
Speaker 5: I passed it off as my own. Of course, got
Speaker 5: the reputation of being clever, which is nice.
Speaker 3: And I should address the social media aspect of this though,
Speaker 3: because I think that ties it back into the universal
Speaker 3: atheist experience. And if you have had a heart attack
Speaker 3: or a stroke, or been in a serious accident and
Speaker 3: you're the out atheist in your family or in your
Speaker 3: friend group, you probably already know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 3: There are certain responses that you've come to expect from
Speaker 3: Christian people. And because I'm on Facebook and I several
Speaker 3: thousand followers there and a lot of them don't like me,
Speaker 3: I had an opportunity to sort of speed run what
Speaker 3: it's like to be an atheist having a medical emergency.
Speaker 3: So I got all these responses. I divided them into
Speaker 3: three categories. Like I said, some of you will recognize them.
Speaker 5: The first, of course, is.
Speaker 3: The i'll pray for you assholes, right and look at
Speaker 3: look if you think, if you honestly believe that you
Speaker 3: have the power of God on your side, and you
Speaker 3: can call upon the magic of the universe to make
Speaker 3: me healthier or more comfortable, and you're willing to do
Speaker 3: that for me, that's very sweet of you, right, have
Speaker 3: at it, do your magic spell. I won't expect real
Speaker 3: magic anymore than I'll expect real tea when my great
Speaker 3: niece invites me to a tea party. Right. So, but fine,
Speaker 3: But as we all know, that's not the only form
Speaker 3: of I'll pray for you, right, Christians have another form
Speaker 3: of I'll pray for you that they reserve because they
Speaker 3: have denied themselves this sweet, sweet release of just telling
Speaker 3: people to go fuck themselves.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: So I ended up with that I'll pray for you
Speaker 3: quite a bit the sort of i'll pray for you,
Speaker 3: oh no, wait. But more prominent than that, of course,
Speaker 3: was the God's vengeance contention.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 3: The people who said God got sick and tired of
Speaker 3: me talking all that shit about his kid and decided
Speaker 3: it was time to do something about it. I was
Speaker 3: wondered if that was the case, which joke got him?
Speaker 3: You know, it was the straw that broke the camel's bag.
Speaker 3: I want to get that one framed, put it up
Speaker 3: in my office. I was, I said to him, I said,
Speaker 3: they said that, They're like, that's God's vengeance. I'm like,
Speaker 3: did he miss Was he aiming for a different because
Speaker 3: they're saying I'm gonna be fine. Maybe he was aiming
Speaker 3: for a different ventricle or something, and they're they're like, no, no,
Speaker 3: if God wanted to kill you, you'd be dead. He's
Speaker 3: good at that. Maybe you've heard of everyone who's ever died.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was God.
Speaker 3: Okay, he wasn't trying to kill you. He was trying
Speaker 3: to wake you up. He was trying to send you
Speaker 3: a message, remind you that you're I'm mortal and he's
Speaker 3: in charge. Like he picked a really weird way to
Speaker 3: send that message by having the most common medical malady to.
Speaker 5: Happen of a person my age happened to me.
Speaker 3: As I'm just saying, because he knows the burning bush trick, right,
Speaker 3: We know that about him. If he had wanted to
Speaker 3: send me a message, he could have just spoken it
Speaker 3: through a bush that was burning and not being consumed
Speaker 3: by the flames.
Speaker 5: I'd have gotten it.
Speaker 3: Twitter trolls wouldn't have had to chime in, we wouldn't
Speaker 3: have to tie up all these limited medical resources in
Speaker 3: rural America. I'm not trying to tell the guy how
Speaker 3: to do his job, but you know, fucking smite better.
Speaker 3: That was the second category. And then there's this third
Speaker 3: category of people, of course, and they were a little
Speaker 3: more prominent at the time, or I guess that's not
Speaker 3: really true. Anti vaxers certainly aren't more any less prominent.
Speaker 3: They're running the goddamn health department now, aren't they. But
Speaker 3: I think they were a little more likely to buddy
Speaker 3: in on other people's conversations in twenty twenty three. Either
Speaker 3: that or I've just gotten better at blocking them since then.
Speaker 3: So when I started talking about my heart attack, I
Speaker 3: got a bunch of the anti vaxxers chiming in as well, Because,
Speaker 3: of course, like I said, you know, when you do
Speaker 3: my job, as that's going to attest you just live
Speaker 3: your life on social media, right, Like if anybody who
Speaker 3: follows me on Facebook knows, you know, yes, I talk
Speaker 3: about atheists, I talk about politics. I also occasionally talk
Speaker 3: about my cats. Is the other way around? I did, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: I know they're going to they're the ones who follow me.
Speaker 3: They're like, no, he talks about his cats and occasionally
Speaker 3: atheism and politics. So when I you know, when I
Speaker 3: have a heart attack, I'm talking about it on Facebook immediately,
Speaker 3: Just like when I got vaccinated for COVID, I was
Speaker 3: talking about it on social media right away, right, And
Speaker 3: so a lot of the people who'd seen that chimed
Speaker 3: in at this point after I had a heart attack
Speaker 3: with this sort of like you know the well, well,
Speaker 3: well you get vaccinated for COVID and here a mirror
Speaker 3: twenty three months.
Speaker 5: Later you have a hearty zone.
Speaker 3: Damn boat for letting Bill Gates put all them micro
Speaker 3: chips in your RNA. We told you this would happen, motherfucker.
Speaker 3: You told me I would turn magnetic. You didn't.
Speaker 5: You didn't say not about no heart attack.
Speaker 3: So but then there are those people too, I'm arguing
Speaker 3: with them on social media. Doctor comes and tells me
Speaker 3: we put down my phone. He says, you're gonna have
Speaker 3: another heart attack while you're having a heart attack.
Speaker 5: This is no good. So he says, he says, what
Speaker 5: I got good news and I got bad news.
Speaker 3: He says. The bad news is you had a heart
Speaker 3: attack and you it wasn't just a block as it
Speaker 3: was in your heart. The ventul is still it's got
Speaker 3: an id something percent occlusion. We have to go in
Speaker 3: there and put in a set. You're gonna need surgery,
Speaker 3: he said. The good news is it's minimally invasive surgery.
Speaker 3: We don't have to open your chest up. You're not
Speaker 3: gonna get a cool zipper like Matt Dilla Hunty got.
Speaker 3: He said, we can do a microsurgery where we either
Speaker 3: go in through your wrist or in through your thigh.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 3: And so the way they do it is they take
Speaker 3: Riquel Welch and they put it in a little spaceship.
Speaker 5: He shows you're down in.
Speaker 2: A real time.
Speaker 3: I'm so nervous. Only just I hope the audience is
Speaker 3: old enough to get that joke. I hope I'm not
Speaker 3: just telling that one to Ann in April. So no,
Speaker 3: but they said, but they send a little probe in
Speaker 3: and they prefer to going through the wrist because that's
Speaker 3: a little less in basive, it's easier to recover, from
Speaker 3: my belief, But it's not as quite as big of
Speaker 3: a vein that they go in through, right, not as
Speaker 3: much room for rickel the corner. So they want to
Speaker 3: go in through the risk, but they have to reserve
Speaker 3: the right to go in through the femeral artery, which means.
Speaker 5: One way or the other, you got to get shaved.
Speaker 3: So the two women come out and whose job it
Speaker 3: is to do that? And apparently along the way they've
Speaker 3: learned that the inherently awkward job of shaving a stranger's
Speaker 3: pubes is made less awkward if you get them laughing first, right,
Speaker 3: So I get wheeled into surgery by Laurel and Hardy. Yeah,
Speaker 3: once you laughed at the Fantastic Boys joke, I know
Speaker 3: I was safe with.
Speaker 5: The Laurel and Hardy reference.
Speaker 3: So, and of course my job, I should point out,
Speaker 3: my actual job is to yes and two comedians doing shtick. Right,
Speaker 3: So we podcast our way into surgery. We're cragging each
Speaker 3: other up, having a great time. They shaving and take
Speaker 3: me in to the thing. They throw me on the
Speaker 3: table button they can throw a towel over my dick
Speaker 3: and say.
Speaker 5: Go, and of course to go.
Speaker 3: The first thing is the anesthesia, right, So they anesthetize me.
Speaker 3: And it's not the anesthesia that I've had in the past,
Speaker 3: where like you blink your eyes and they have to
Speaker 3: suddenly try to convince you that two hours of your
Speaker 3: life is passed. Right, It's not that kind of anesthesia.
Speaker 3: It's not something notch unconscious or sorry. It doesn't you
Speaker 3: fade in and out of consciousness. But through most of
Speaker 3: my heart surgery, I was awake enough to know what
Speaker 3: was happening. And it was during that surgery that I
Speaker 3: had my not quite dying experience, sorry, near death experience
Speaker 3: was taken. So I'm in surgery and then go in
Speaker 3: through the wrist, and my wrist starts to bleed uncontrollably,
Speaker 3: and this is like not uncommon. This that's why they
Speaker 3: had to shave in the first place, right, So they
Speaker 3: can go in through the female artery at this point,
Speaker 3: so it's not like an emergency, but it's the kind
Speaker 3: of thing that they have to react to right now,
Speaker 3: because bleeding uncontrollably from the wrist is a bad thing, right,
Speaker 3: So in order to like sort of alert the rest
Speaker 3: of the surgical suite as to what was going on.
Speaker 3: The surgeon said, he's hemorrhaging, and he said it twice
Speaker 3: with increasing urgency. Right, So he said it like he goes,
Speaker 3: he's hemorrhaging. He's hemorrhaging. Y'all has some scary shit to
Speaker 3: hear when you are in heart surgery.
Speaker 5: Right, that's right up there with what's this bit here due?
Speaker 3: And at the moment, right, hemorrhaging just means bleeding, right,
Speaker 3: But at the moment I couldn't really pull a definition
Speaker 3: on it. He was just saying one of those things
Speaker 3: that doctors say in medical dramas right before the patient dies.
Speaker 3: Right that way, he's hemorrhaging. He's hemorrhaging comes right before clear.
Speaker 3: And like I said, the anesthesia had me fading in
Speaker 3: and out. Well, it shows that moment as an out moment.
Speaker 3: So as he's saying he's hemorrhaging, he's hemorrhaging, my peripheral
Speaker 3: vision is blacking out and it's all closing into a
Speaker 3: small tunnel and I cannot chase it away, And so
Speaker 3: I concluded that I was dying, that this is how
Speaker 3: I was going to check out of the world, and
Speaker 3: my brain said, well, shit, I better formulate some final
Speaker 3: thoughts or there's gonna be a shitty talk. So my
Speaker 3: brain and I hope you guys aren't holding out for
Speaker 3: something profound here, because this is it.
Speaker 5: This is all that I thought as I lay.
Speaker 3: There dyeing, I thought, you gotta admit I did pretty
Speaker 3: good though. That was it. That was it. There was
Speaker 3: nothing about fear, there was nothing about an afterlife. There
Speaker 3: was nothing about religion, there was nothing about regret, there
Speaker 3: was nothing about sadness. Just sort of a B minus.
Speaker 3: I'd give it a B minus. And then I woke up,
Speaker 3: of course, and I did so with this newfound liberty
Speaker 3: that I've carried ever since. You know, people will talk
Speaker 3: about living on borrow time. I don't feel like I'm
Speaker 3: living on borrowed time. I've lived through one and a
Speaker 3: half Trump administrations. The universe at least owes me those
Speaker 3: six years back, right, So but I do live with
Speaker 3: this newfound liberty because this all my life. Ever since
Speaker 3: I was old enough to understand mortality, I've thought about
Speaker 3: that final moment. What would it be like to die,
Speaker 3: What would I be thinking about? What would I be afraid?
Speaker 3: Of what would I be sad about? What would I
Speaker 3: be regretting for? Certainly I would be sad, Certainly I
Speaker 3: would be filled with regret. Certainly I'd be filled with fear,
Speaker 3: fear of sadness, and regret of the substance of death.
Speaker 3: That's the shit death is made of.
Speaker 5: Isn't it.
Speaker 3: But what if it's not? What if that's just another
Speaker 3: lie that religion told us. I mean, if you think
Speaker 3: about it, it's a good life. I mean we're talking.
Speaker 3: Religion is selling the cure for death. They have a
Speaker 3: vested interest in us being as afraid of it as possible.
Speaker 3: But sure like when other people around us die, we
Speaker 3: feel fear of a world without them, We feel sadness
Speaker 3: of the person we lost, We feel regret of everything
Speaker 3: that we could have done. But when we die, what's
Speaker 3: to fear? And that's how you die like an atheist.
Speaker 3: How you die like an atheist. You die with the
Speaker 3: knowledge that you were going to die, with the knowledge
Speaker 3: every day of your life that you weren't going to
Speaker 3: get another chance of it in your second life or
Speaker 3: your reincarnation, that you weren't going to get eternity to
Speaker 3: make everything right, that this was your one shot. That's
Speaker 3: how you die? How do you die? Like an ATHEI
Speaker 3: should die with your eyes open. I mean, don't get
Speaker 3: me wrong, I'm not looking forward to it. I don't
Speaker 3: want to die. I love being alive. I don't want
Speaker 3: to be alive as long as I possibly can. But
Speaker 3: loving life and fearing death are not the same thing.
Speaker 3: At least they don't have to be. Thanks, that's my time,
Speaker 3: stay here, Thank you so much.
Speaker 2: Short break. When I come back, you will hear my
Speaker 2: thirty minute presentation from the big Cincinnati event.
Speaker 3: Hang on, so now I get to introduce my friend.
Speaker 3: Let me tell you this guy is well, he's one
Speaker 3: of those guys that you know doesn't need any introduction,
Speaker 3: like literally doesn't need any introduction. But I have to
Speaker 3: introduce him anyway. So let me just say. He is
Speaker 3: an author, he is an activist, and he is the
Speaker 3: godfather of atheist podcasting Ladies, gentlemen, and other Seth Andrews.
Speaker 2: I have titled my presentation today good people giving bad
Speaker 2: advice or a bad perspective. My alternative title was all
Speaker 2: the times our parents were completely full of shit. But
Speaker 2: this presentation is about more than just our parents. The
Speaker 2: internet is I mean, everybody right online you see all
Speaker 2: kinds of platitudes, and I'm going to get back to
Speaker 2: some of those motivators. You guys see those They fly
Speaker 2: onto your feed, usually by people whose lives are the
Speaker 2: most screwed up. They're the ones who are posting the inspirationals.
Speaker 2: But everybody, everybody, friends, relatives, co workers, total strangers are
Speaker 2: giving us a perspective that may or may not be
Speaker 2: really good. And I want to explore the life hacks
Speaker 2: that are suggested by hacks, starting with this popular saying,
Speaker 2: never go to bed angry. Why not? Why not? One
Speaker 2: riff on this one has been circulating online. Don't go
Speaker 2: to bed angry, stay up late, and plot revenge. But
Speaker 2: it's almost always framed as a kind of relationship advice,
Speaker 2: and on a certain level, I get it, if possible,
Speaker 2: it is better to resolve conflict rather than let it simmer.
Speaker 2: Fix it so you're not stewing all night. We know
Speaker 2: what it's like to lie in bed, be in the
Speaker 2: same space with somebody else when an argument's going on
Speaker 2: and we want to get that over with. But don't
Speaker 2: go to bed angry also implies that resolution is always
Speaker 2: possible in a day if ever, and it puts pressure
Speaker 2: on people to rush through a problem that might take
Speaker 2: a lot longer to fix, or it might not even
Speaker 2: be fixable. Anger it can reflect understandable hurt. It can
Speaker 2: give us perspective. It can motivate us to pursue something better.
Speaker 2: In many cases, the right thing is to go to
Speaker 2: bed angry. By the way, have you ever met a
Speaker 2: couple that said this with a straight face? They said, ah,
Speaker 2: we've never had an argument, never had an argument. If
Speaker 2: someone says this to me, I don't trust those people.
Speaker 2: They're either lying through their tear or they're aliens. Right,
Speaker 2: in my conservative upbringing, it was pretty much a foregone
Speaker 2: conclusion that I was going to get married, right, get married,
Speaker 2: have kids, build a life's a riff on the book
Speaker 2: of Genesis, be fruitful and multiply. Wasn't said out loud
Speaker 2: quite in that way, But I mean, I've got five
Speaker 2: siblings and they all had kids. My parents watched me
Speaker 2: not have kids, and they're like, oh, come on, it's
Speaker 2: gonna happen. That time will come. I was married at
Speaker 2: twenty two. Two years later they still smiled at me.
Speaker 2: Oh it'll happens. It's gonna happen. One day, three years,
Speaker 2: five years, seven years, people started to raise an eyebrow.
Speaker 2: Everybody around almost everybody around me was married with children,
Speaker 2: and the narrative was that children make family or complete
Speaker 2: a family. Normal people want kids, and I get the
Speaker 2: joys of communicating the fulfillment that comes with being a
Speaker 2: mother or a father. I mean, I get that, and
Speaker 2: for a lot of folks, parenthood completes them. But for
Speaker 2: those of us who never wanted that for ourselves, it
Speaker 2: was just bad advice. And I think what bothers me
Speaker 2: the most is this attitude of expectation, even judgment when
Speaker 2: we make a very personal decision whether to or not
Speaker 2: to have children. Right, and we have all seen people
Speaker 2: give themselves permission to say some pretty alarming things. What
Speaker 2: you don't like kids, you're just being selfish. Maybe who
Speaker 2: will take care of you when you get old? That's
Speaker 2: a fun one. Well, good advice would be what makes
Speaker 2: you happy? Does it include children? Wonderful? Does it not wonderful? Right? Whatever?
Speaker 2: Whatever is you do that? By the way, have you
Speaker 2: seen this meme and says let's have kids, so instead
Speaker 2: of doing fun stuff on the weekend, we can go
Speaker 2: to a children's birthday party where everybody cough more wisdom
Speaker 2: from the wisdom givers. Find someone you can't live without.
Speaker 2: The alternate version is find somebody who can't live without you,
Speaker 2: And this, of course makes us think of her. You
Speaker 2: guys seen this the overly Attached girlfriend mim. It's been
Speaker 2: flying around since twenty twelve. The backstory on this real
Speaker 2: fast is there was a woman named Lena Morris of Denton, Texas,
Speaker 2: and she was entering a contest with a parody video,
Speaker 2: and so she did this total thing. She was acting
Speaker 2: being funny, and to her total shock, a screenshot from
Speaker 2: the video of this creepy there took off and it
Speaker 2: went viral and she became famous for a reason she
Speaker 2: never expected. But if somebody says I can't live without you,
Speaker 2: we think of the Badfinger song. You guys know the
Speaker 2: tune I can't live if living is without you. What's
Speaker 2: the underlying message? If you break up with me, I'm
Speaker 2: gonna off myself. Why would you want somebody who can't
Speaker 2: live without you. There's a comedian. His name is Chris Porter.
Speaker 2: He came out with a special a few years ago
Speaker 2: called Ugly and Angry, and he said he was told
Speaker 2: to go out and find somebody who couldn't live without him,
Speaker 2: And he instantly regretted it because he found that it
Speaker 2: was like having a puppy that can text you like
Speaker 2: I want Natalie to be with me. I wanted to
Speaker 2: be my wife, But I don't want her to do
Speaker 2: it because she can't live without me. I want her
Speaker 2: to do it because she could pretty much have anybody
Speaker 2: she wants, and she picked me. Right. If I got
Speaker 2: hit by a bus tomorrow, I'd want her to go
Speaker 2: on and live her life. Isn't that better? Healthier? How
Speaker 2: about this one? Stay together for the sake of the kids.
Speaker 2: But how many people called it quits because not staying
Speaker 2: together actually give their children a better place with better possibilities.
Speaker 2: How does locking yourself inside a failed relationship benefit kids?
Speaker 2: What does it teach kids respect your elders? Now, on
Speaker 2: the surface, I get this in some contexts. I mean,
Speaker 2: unless something inappropriate is happening. Children under the guardianship of
Speaker 2: parents and teachers, etc. Have to be mindful to respect
Speaker 2: adult authority. But once you have grown into your own identity,
Speaker 2: relationship decisions, does being older automatic earn respect. Everybody in
Speaker 2: this room can think of somebody who's older. They may
Speaker 2: be a meddler, an idiot, or an asshole, but they're older.
Speaker 2: Here's a fun one. Never have sex before marriage. Save yourself,
Speaker 2: keep yourself pure. This is often linked to the Bible's
Speaker 2: advice on chastity. Marriage should be honored by all in
Speaker 2: the marriage bed kept pure, and in my Christian upbringing,
Speaker 2: it was set over and overweight until you are husband
Speaker 2: and wife before you have sex. That's terrible advice. Have
Speaker 2: you seen this one? It's not premarital sex if you
Speaker 2: have no intention of getting married. This idea was almost
Speaker 2: unthinkable in my home right. The whole point of dating
Speaker 2: was prep for marriage. Close contact was not just physically dangerous,
Speaker 2: it was spiritually dangerous. Here's a gem I saw a
Speaker 2: while back. I still can't tell if it's a joke
Speaker 2: or they played it real, leaving room for the Holy spirit.
Speaker 2: When you dance, my bag to school wouldn't have a
Speaker 2: prom because of dancing. They wouldn't not allow a prom.
Speaker 2: They called dancing the vertical expression of a horizontal desire.
Speaker 2: Massive amounts of energy spent trying to keep sexually activated,
Speaker 2: hormonal young people away from each other. How did that
Speaker 2: work out? It did not, because teenagers are monumentally creative,
Speaker 2: and I know you fall into that category. And the
Speaker 2: no sex before marriage thing is part of purity culture.
Speaker 2: Keep yourself pure in the eyes of God and man.
Speaker 2: Don't defile the temple. Don't be an adulterer in your heart.
Speaker 2: Here's a toxic little Bible verse out of First Corinthians.
Speaker 2: But if they cannot exercise self control, they should marry,
Speaker 2: for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.
Speaker 2: If you don't think you can control yourself, sign that
Speaker 2: marriage contract asap. This verse is responsible for so much harm.
Speaker 2: How much do you know about the world or even
Speaker 2: yourself when you're seventeen, eighteen, nineteen twenty, how even twenty five?
Speaker 2: How do you bond yourself to somebody else when you're
Speaker 2: still getting to know yourself? Was marriage even something we wanted?
Speaker 2: Did our religion require us to get a parental blessing?
Speaker 2: I remember asking my first marriage. I remember having to
Speaker 2: ask permission. We were both adults, but I had to
Speaker 2: go ask permission. Nah, sign that marriage contract. And then
Speaker 2: comes the really important question, how do you even know
Speaker 2: you are emotionally physically sexually compatible if it's a honeymoon
Speaker 2: surprise you're already locked into a legal contract. That's bad advice. Plus,
Speaker 2: study after study has shown that abstinence programs don't even
Speaker 2: freaking work. You cannot tell people cross your legs until
Speaker 2: they make a lifelong commitment and expect that to work.
Speaker 2: An article in the Journal of Adolescent Health revealed that
Speaker 2: abstinence programs can be a huge boundary violation. They might
Speaker 2: stigmatize a healthy part of being human. They can perpetuate
Speaker 2: harmful gender stereotypes, and they can make people less safe
Speaker 2: and less happy. Better advice is get educated, understand what
Speaker 2: sex is, is what it does, protect yourself and your partner,
Speaker 2: discuss boundaries, discuss desires, enjoy being a sexual creature, and
Speaker 2: tell the meddlers and the moralists they can fuck off. Besides,
Speaker 2: we know that many of those moralists, the teachers and
Speaker 2: the pastors and the parents and whatnot, we know they
Speaker 2: have been banging things that are definitely not a Bible. Right,
Speaker 2: you guys seen this one? Grandma says, all people think
Speaker 2: about sex these days, sixteen kids. Maybe Grandma was married,
Speaker 2: Maybe she was married, but it's still funny. Okay, how's
Speaker 2: this one for reductive? There are one hundred variations on
Speaker 2: this quote attributed to the Buddha, never tell a lie.
Speaker 2: Anyone who can tell you the slightest of lies is
Speaker 2: also capable of any evil. The most famous version of this,
Speaker 2: of course, comes out of the Old Testament, the ninth commandments,
Speaker 2: do not bear false witness. Now, my problem with this
Speaker 2: advice or command is not that we shouldn't be honest
Speaker 2: and honorable. My problem is is that it's reductive and
Speaker 2: gives zero context. And here's the scenario. I like, there's
Speaker 2: a woman in your neighborhood. She shows up at your door.
Speaker 2: Her husband is a domestic abuser, comes home drunk and violent.
Speaker 2: She's trying to get away. Please can you help? You
Speaker 2: open your door? You let her inside, you lock the door.
Speaker 2: Five minutes later, the raging husband shows up and says,
Speaker 2: is my wife in your house? In that scenario, in
Speaker 2: that context, to make him go away, to protect the abused,
Speaker 2: to make everyone safer. The moral act is to lie
Speaker 2: your ass off. If he goes away, you bought time
Speaker 2: and you've reduced the threat in this scenario. Exodus chapter
Speaker 2: twenty is giving bad advice. Truth telling is necessary, but
Speaker 2: isn't it also situational? I don't know always whether it's
Speaker 2: you should tell a fib or a white lie. But
Speaker 2: I mean, if we're helping someone feel less wounded and
Speaker 2: a bit more validated, perhaps am I misguiding others? Okay,
Speaker 2: it's messy. Psychologists have written a lot about the FIBs
Speaker 2: that we tell to navigate our lives, right, because we
Speaker 2: don't want to hurt feelings, you know. But I just
Speaker 2: don't think it's a moral atrocity to say, oh, the
Speaker 2: cold sore on your lip, I don't even notice it,
Speaker 2: don't worry about that. And yes, I think we would
Speaker 2: all lie to the Naziss if they banged on our
Speaker 2: doors looking for the Jews. I hate this one. Well,
Speaker 2: we've all heard it. I'm not being mean, I'm just
Speaker 2: brutally honest. The problem is a lot of people seem
Speaker 2: a whole lot more interested in the brutal than the honest.
Speaker 2: Not just being sincere and compassionately direct, but I mean
Speaker 2: saying some really nasty stuff. I am thinking of somebody
Speaker 2: right now, and she, in much of her life, is
Speaker 2: a stellar human being, but she will say the cruelest
Speaker 2: stuff to someone and act like she's doing them a favor.
Speaker 2: I saw this one and said Brutal honesty is sweeter
Speaker 2: than sugar coated lies. And this sounds noble right all
Speaker 2: It may sound like I'm being hurtful, but I'm really
Speaker 2: helping you. Yet we all know there's a way to
Speaker 2: be helpful without being a total dick. Psychology Today did
Speaker 2: an article a few years ago about brutal honesty, and
Speaker 2: it says, long after the brutally honest have shared their truth,
Speaker 2: the recipient continues to feel the pain. Brutally honest people
Speaker 2: may be unaware of the harm done by their words,
Speaker 2: or they may be giving themselves an easy out. Practicing
Speaker 2: truth with compassion is a great way to speak of
Speaker 2: painful truth to another while respecting their feelings. I kind
Speaker 2: of like this. I saw someone using this phrase. How
Speaker 2: about compassionate candor with people we care about? Be direct,
Speaker 2: be truthful, but never without compassion, never without empathy, never
Speaker 2: without humanity. We can be honest, we can be direct,
Speaker 2: but we can also be good. Here's another take. People
Speaker 2: hate me because I say blunt truths about them. Well,
Speaker 2: all truth is good to know, but not all truth
Speaker 2: is good to say, right, which relates to the next
Speaker 2: inspirational motivators. Sticks and stones may break my bones. But
Speaker 2: words will never hurt me. Shut up. It's the dumbest saying.
Speaker 2: Whoever came up with this. Words have incredible power. They
Speaker 2: were It's like who we are, what we think, how
Speaker 2: we feel. They show love, they show hate, they can elevate,
Speaker 2: they can devastate, And I think there's a noble intent
Speaker 2: no one else can define. You consider the source. Leave
Speaker 2: those people in the rear view mirror. They're just vowels
Speaker 2: and consonants, not guns and knives. Right, don't let them
Speaker 2: hurt you. I get that, But all of us have
Speaker 2: been wounded in our lives with the worst of words.
Speaker 2: And I know you're thinking of someone or an instance
Speaker 2: right now. You're stupid, You're fat, You're ugly, You're worthless,
Speaker 2: You're an embarrassment. I don't love you. You'll never amount
Speaker 2: to anything. You're a loser, You're a failure. What about
Speaker 2: the racial and sexual slurs that have been thrown at
Speaker 2: marginalized groups? Those dehumanizing terms are weapons with great power.
Speaker 2: Here's another piece of wisdom that I hate. What doesn't
Speaker 2: kill you makes you stronger, or it fucks you up
Speaker 2: for their the rest of your life. We can talk
Speaker 2: about what it means what stronger means. There are lessons
Speaker 2: about developing fortitude. You know, through adversity we become more
Speaker 2: adapted to navigate the storms. Sometimes the things that don't
Speaker 2: kill us don't make us stronger. Sometimes they break us
Speaker 2: into tiny pieces. The abuse victim dealing with trauma she survived,
Speaker 2: he survived, but they are dealing with it for decades.
Speaker 2: Are they stronger? Automatically? The patient in a coma wasn't killed,
Speaker 2: still breathing. Are they stronger? Maybe you've seen this T
Speaker 2: shirt what doesn't kill you mutates and tries again? Or
Speaker 2: if they say, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
Speaker 2: At this point, my dear, I should be able to
Speaker 2: bench press of viewing more cookie wisdom. Failure is not
Speaker 2: an option. I like the sentiment don't give up. If
Speaker 2: you fall, press on, get up, get back on the horse.
Speaker 2: How many success stories have happened because the dreamer wouldn't
Speaker 2: give up. There's a call to tenacity that I like,
Speaker 2: and I never ever want to kill the dream. But
Speaker 2: where's the context? Why did we fail? Was our goal
Speaker 2: unrealistic in the first place? Had we not put in
Speaker 2: the work? Were we blocked by someone or something that
Speaker 2: was totally out of our control. Was I pursuing something
Speaker 2: that wasn't even in line with my own abilities? It
Speaker 2: was a bad fit. What about the time when failure
Speaker 2: was a good thing? Sometimes failure is just feedback through it.
Speaker 2: We learn, we grow, we evolve, We figure out when
Speaker 2: to press forward, to stop, reverse, take a left, take
Speaker 2: a right. We discover things about ourselves. Sometimes failure is
Speaker 2: a healthy option, because the alternative is to crash and burn.
Speaker 2: Life is not a meme. Life is life. Believing in
Speaker 2: ourselves doesn't mean we might not have a wrong belief
Speaker 2: about ourselves. Failure might correctly course correct us. Anybody see
Speaker 2: this demotivator, every dead body on Mount Edverest who's once
Speaker 2: a highly motivated person? So maybe calm down. This one
Speaker 2: drives me crazy. Everything happens for a reason. Now, you
Speaker 2: and I understand cause and effect. We know that things
Speaker 2: have causes, But reason implies an agenda. Right, there's a
Speaker 2: reason maker, there's cosmic equilibrium. The universe will align itself.
Speaker 2: Everything's going to work out the way that it should,
Speaker 2: all right. Explain that to people dying of cancer, people
Speaker 2: who lose their houses in a tornado, get shot inside
Speaker 2: a scar. Those things have causes, But what would a
Speaker 2: reason be for something so unreasonable? And of course you
Speaker 2: and I know the idea of agency can give comfort
Speaker 2: in troubling times. In a chaotic world. We self medicate
Speaker 2: with this belief that everything in the universe will eventually
Speaker 2: sort itself out. Everything happens for a reason. But is
Speaker 2: it true? I saw this one. I think I may
Speaker 2: have posted it a few days ago. Everything happens for
Speaker 2: a reason. Sometimes that reason is you're stupid and make
Speaker 2: bad choices. I enjoyed this one. Your life can't fall
Speaker 2: apart if you never had it together. Happiness is temporary,
Speaker 2: death is forever. Have a nice weekend tradition. Just because
Speaker 2: you've always done it that way doesn't mean it's not
Speaker 2: incredibly stupid. If you put an inspirational quote under your selfie,
Speaker 2: no one can see your narcissism, Signed Gandhi. Kindness is
Speaker 2: my mission, but fuck off is my wingman. For those
Speaker 2: who do come to us asking for counsel but not
Speaker 2: really listening, we have a term for that. We call
Speaker 2: them the askhole. The person who constantly asks for advice
Speaker 2: and always does the opposite of what you tell them.
Speaker 2: Success if you put your mind to it. You can
Speaker 2: accomplish anything. If you have rich parents, become the reason
Speaker 2: they install cameras. Fuck off, then keep fucking off, fuck
Speaker 2: off until you come up to a gate with a
Speaker 2: sign saying you can't fuck off past here. Climb over
Speaker 2: the gate, Dream the impossible dream, and keep fucking off
Speaker 2: forever you are enough. We don't need any more of you. Sorry.
Speaker 2: And of course, for any treki in the room, you'll
Speaker 2: get this one good advice. Please do not bang for machines.
Speaker 2: This one is especially prescient. Never get involved in a
Speaker 2: land war in Asia. This is actually true. Ninety of
Speaker 2: being married is just shouting what from other rooms. More
Speaker 2: family wisdom here. This was posted a few days ago.
Speaker 2: Blood is thicker than water, but cheese dip is thicker
Speaker 2: than blood, so technically caso is more important than family.
Speaker 2: If your cup is only half full, you probably need
Speaker 2: a different braw. Some cause happiness wherever they go, others
Speaker 2: whenever they go. We found the I in tea m
Speaker 2: It is hidden in the a hole. Drinking a large
Speaker 2: amount of water every day helps you avoid other people's
Speaker 2: drama because you're too busy. P stay hydrated. Nothing can
Speaker 2: stop you because you're a magic skeleton packed with meat
Speaker 2: and animated with electricity and imagination. You have a cave
Speaker 2: in You're face, full of sharp bones, and five tentacles
Speaker 2: at the end of each arm. You can do anything.
Speaker 2: Magic skeleton. Ultimately, I think we all want to receive wisdom.
Speaker 2: We all want to be receptive to advice, we all
Speaker 2: want to be inspired. But bullshit is bullshit, and we
Speaker 2: have to be ready for that, even if we can't
Speaker 2: smell the bullshit right away. So let's stay skeptical. Let's
Speaker 2: try and then let's fail and try again. Let's achieve.
Speaker 2: Let's go forward and then backward, then sideways and learn
Speaker 2: and grow and build some bridges and burn some other bridges.
Speaker 2: Let's draw the lines and the circles and the exes
Speaker 2: and the boundaries, and let's remember there is a difference,
Speaker 2: a big difference between psychology and pop psychology. Life is
Speaker 2: not lived in memes, And if someone says it is,
Speaker 2: you can give them some meme wisdom of your own,
Speaker 2: and you can say, you know, A good place to
Speaker 2: put inspirational quotes is up your ass. Thank you very
Speaker 2: much for.
Speaker 3: Letting me talk to you.
Speaker 2: Who you go?
Speaker 3: All right?
Speaker 2: Before we take a fifteen minute break, I'm going to
Speaker 2: bring Loa back on stage, and I want us to
Speaker 2: share just a little piece of our lives with you
Speaker 2: if I may, And I'm going to alternate. No, I'm
Speaker 2: going to have you read your own hate mail, which
Speaker 2: is tad with your name, and I will read mine.
Speaker 2: Now you have received crazy stuff in your inbox. I'm
Speaker 2: sure your social media feeds. This is not exclusive to activists,
Speaker 2: but I will say we get a higher volume of it,
Speaker 2: and the crazy level may be a little bit more amplified. So,
Speaker 2: ladies and gentlemen, for your approval, we would like to
Speaker 2: share with you weird comments and hate mail, and I
Speaker 2: will start with this one. Robert said, you like other
Speaker 2: athirst are damn Noah, Yeah, this one's great one.
Speaker 3: It's you are such an f chowerd And I would
Speaker 3: think that's fucking but as you can see, every time
Speaker 3: he shows up with it, there are too many asterisks.
Speaker 3: I have no idea what he's going for. You are
Speaker 3: such an eving coward. Have you even looked at the
Speaker 3: evidence of the shroud of turn? Because if you had
Speaker 3: the courage to look at it objectively, you would not
Speaker 3: continue to deny the.
Speaker 5: Power and truth in Christ.
Speaker 3: But you fing atheists have to hide from the evidence,
Speaker 3: just like you hide from the light. There has been
Speaker 3: real science done on it, and you could find it
Speaker 3: if only you just had the courage to look. F you.
Speaker 2: Followed by scripture.
Speaker 6: Yes, I.
Speaker 3: Looked him up there all about how I'm gonna get
Speaker 3: beat up by the army of Jesus. Except for John
Speaker 3: three sixteen.
Speaker 2: Of course, I had a couple. Daniel said, a thinking
Speaker 2: atheist is an oxymoron, You dumb kunt and then blaize
Speaker 2: use the F slur. Now, it is remarkable how many
Speaker 2: people who and I know that a great great many
Speaker 2: religious people are not these people. They're not filled with
Speaker 2: hate and bigotry and toxicity. So I want to be fair.
Speaker 2: But there are also a great many people who are
Speaker 2: waving the God banner, waving their Bibles and telling us
Speaker 2: we're all going to Hell, who lead with unbelievable racial
Speaker 2: sexual slurs. The women in this movement know exactly what
Speaker 2: I am talking about, and I find that interesting.
Speaker 3: Noah, Yeah, so this guy's probably a little bit too
Speaker 3: long to read the whole thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: The sound shame of it is is that there's actually
Speaker 3: like eleven more paragraphs of this, but about four paragraphs
Speaker 3: from the end, he gives up on the emojis. He's like,
Speaker 3: that's a lot of work.
Speaker 2: But he's warning you about nuclear war with the radioactives,
Speaker 2: sign global markets, a treaty with Israel. The witnesses are
Speaker 2: coming forward mass apostasy. I guess that's everybody in this room.
Speaker 3: Here's one.
Speaker 2: If Seth was placed in a position of authority over
Speaker 2: the masses, our society would grow to resemble North Korea
Speaker 2: jacked up on steroids. I don't give a flying fuck
Speaker 2: how off topic I am either. I'm telling you Seth
Speaker 2: is a certified fucking psychopath and is not the type
Speaker 2: of creep you would want around your children. Wow.
Speaker 3: I want to point out this is actually a comment
Speaker 3: on one of Seth's video hosts, Noah looks like a
Speaker 3: murderer from Silence of the Lambs, which is another way
Speaker 3: of saying no, it looks like a movie star until
Speaker 3: I heard him speak creepy, look great, intelligent conversation. Thanks,
Speaker 3: I guess.
Speaker 2: Brutally honest. No, brutally honest.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna go ahead and read this because it speaks
Speaker 2: to something that I will occasionally hear from someone A
Speaker 2: lot of things that the same here is correct. Promise
Speaker 2: is Seth took money in order to speak at Christian rallies.
Speaker 2: He would take their money and come to their rallies
Speaker 2: and talk in front of massive groups of Christians. Seth
Speaker 2: would literally take their money and sell everyone out just
Speaker 2: to get their money. I have no respect for Seth
Speaker 2: because if you have to take someone's money in order
Speaker 2: to speak at a rally, then you are a trader.
Speaker 2: And then I'll spare the rest of it. Essentially, he's
Speaker 2: saying now that I'm on the other side of religion.
Speaker 2: If I do anything or profit, if I do anything
Speaker 2: to make a living full time as an activist, I
Speaker 2: am also a poser. I am a fucking liar. I
Speaker 2: go to Christian Riley's I guess rallies, takes their money
Speaker 2: and speaks in front of tons of Christian crowds. After
Speaker 2: he takes their money. He also uses the money bag emoji,
Speaker 2: which I wasn't convinced until I did see the money
Speaker 2: bag emoji. And now he is absolutely credible and I
Speaker 2: want to thank him for his unsolicited Do you want
Speaker 2: to point illusions?
Speaker 3: Do you want to point out that he had too
Speaker 3: many asterisks? After his f two might be the same guy.
Speaker 3: That is all one sentence. That's creepy at shit. All right,
Speaker 3: So this is a great one. I love this so much.
Speaker 3: I got this from Mohammed. The English isn't great. He's
Speaker 3: just giving me a bunch of questions, because you know
Speaker 3: how Christians think we owe them answers to scientific questions.
Speaker 3: I could google.
Speaker 5: I won't give you all of them, but it's like
Speaker 5: a when.
Speaker 3: How and in what form heavens and the earth and
Speaker 3: what is between them was created, How a solar system
Speaker 3: was set, how climates were set. My favorite is when
Speaker 3: we asked about milk, how production of milk was developed.
Speaker 3: There's leading actation to him, mother pucker all the winds.
Speaker 2: Jim sent the love of Jesus when he said, fuck you, asshole.
Speaker 2: God will judge you. And I happily included his full
Speaker 2: name and his photo because he made it public in
Speaker 2: the first place. Okay, I sent this reply to Jim
Speaker 2: after he said fuck you asshole, God will judge you.
Speaker 2: I said, quick note Jim, with its first recorded use
Speaker 2: linked to the fourteenth century. Asshole is one word, a
Speaker 2: compound noun formulated as a single lexical unit, whether referring
Speaker 2: to either the anatomical feature of a body or an
Speaker 2: undesirable person. The British often replaced the first s with
Speaker 2: an R, producing an insult, which has arguably more flair.
Speaker 2: Urse whole arse is derived from the Proto Germanic word arsaws,
Speaker 2: which itself is drawn from the Indo European ores, meaning buttocks.
Speaker 2: In the fourteen hundreds, Old English referred to an arsehol,
Speaker 2: with the whool defined as an orifice in the body,
Speaker 2: like a nostril or ear canal. As such, in the
Speaker 2: context of your threat, if I'm not the actual rectal
Speaker 2: terminus of the large intestine, but m instead the negative
Speaker 2: space within it, how might the whole itself be judged?
Speaker 2: Just trying to prepare myself. Thanks for sharing Jesus's love,
Speaker 2: no illusions? Ah oh yeah, no, this guy was great.
Speaker 3: I have heard your show and have heard you speak
Speaker 3: against the Lord God.
Speaker 2: Will not be mocked on Noa's show.
Speaker 3: Yeah yes, he well, good luck with that.
Speaker 2: You will know hell on.
Speaker 3: Earth for your blasphemies upon the return of Christ. If
Speaker 3: not before, look over your shoulder, heathen, for the righteous
Speaker 3: may walk behind you. I will not debase myself to
Speaker 3: use the language you would have used in this situation.
Speaker 3: Dude makes a death threat and then he's like, but
Speaker 3: I don't want to be rude about this, but know
Speaker 3: that God will have the last laugh, as will I.
Speaker 3: One are the others going to have the last laugh?
Speaker 3: I mean you're not both. I guess maybe you could
Speaker 3: both laugh together.
Speaker 2: No, not a weird insult. I mean, how many times
Speaker 2: have people said the equivalent You'd just wait till you're
Speaker 2: dead and you'll see that way.
Speaker 3: His name isn't Miles. That's like Latin for Army of
Speaker 3: Christ or something.
Speaker 2: I recently did an event with Guts It Given and
Speaker 2: Forrest Valcai, and in advance of that, someone sent me
Speaker 2: this men A guy named Mark said, I'd noticed recently
Speaker 2: that both you and your friend Forrest have very high
Speaker 2: forehid Buffalo Bill and Lurch on stage with you today.
Speaker 2: This was an invitation I got to debate Can't Hoven
Speaker 2: Oh God? And I saved the email. Hello, Seth. I
Speaker 2: followed your work on The Thinking Atheist and appreciate your
Speaker 2: respectful and thoughtful approach to discussions on faith and skepticism.
Speaker 2: Can't Hoven has expressed interest in a debate on evolution
Speaker 2: and creationism. We would be honored if you would consider
Speaker 2: participating in this civil dialogue aimed at informing a broad audience.
Speaker 2: Please let me know if you'd be open to learning more.
Speaker 2: And I stared at the email for about ten minutes
Speaker 2: and I clicked reply, and I said, good morning. I
Speaker 2: would rather put a campfire out with my face in
Speaker 2: christ Seth andrews, Okay, everybody, then, I think it might
Speaker 2: make you smile as well. And I describe everything pretty
Speaker 2: well now when we start the Q and A. The
Speaker 2: first questioner did not have a mic on, and so
Speaker 2: I think you can hear what he says. It's kind
Speaker 2: of sketchy audio, but every questioner after that sounds a
Speaker 2: whole lot better. So stick with me after the first
Speaker 2: part of that first question, and then after that everything
Speaker 2: becomes much more clear. We continue next. Okay, let's draw
Speaker 2: a number and you tell me what you've got. Everyone
Speaker 2: pull your tickets out and be ready.
Speaker 3: All right, we got number of two.
Speaker 2: O, two, three, five, six two, What is the one? Well,
Speaker 2: we have the Poop and Learn book. You'll come on
Speaker 2: up here real fast. We will deliver it. Do you
Speaker 2: want to sign that? Let's let's let's let's make it official.
Speaker 2: I mean, why not, We'll just sign Uh, we'll sign
Speaker 2: the front here for you. I should sign Matt de
Speaker 2: la Hunt's name.
Speaker 3: This is by Willie Wiper. By the way, I notice
Speaker 3: that at least.
Speaker 2: Uh the prize first one to raise their hand. Anyone
Speaker 2: here have a cross tattoo? Come on, you were first.
Speaker 2: You don't have to show it.
Speaker 3: You don't.
Speaker 2: You don't have to show it, but I will show
Speaker 2: you what you've won. Congratulations. You got a couple of
Speaker 2: coins that you can keep handy. They are, in fact
Speaker 2: your last fucks, so you can give those away. Here
Speaker 2: you can have my last fuck. Congratulations, big hand for
Speaker 2: our recipients. Okay, give me your number, John, Okay?
Speaker 3: Uh see two three five two?
Speaker 2: What's up with the front row?
Speaker 3: I need to do a better orange juice?
Speaker 2: What has he won? A Bob Ross toaster which imprints
Speaker 2: the face of Bob Ross on your morning toast? Congratulations?
Speaker 2: Do you want? Do you want the box sign?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I've decided Bob Ross.
Speaker 2: Awesome.
Speaker 3: We'll give you a.
Speaker 2: Happy little signature next to a happy little tree and
Speaker 2: a happy little bird. Anybody else obsessed with old Bob
Speaker 2: Ross shows? I watched them all the time, the man
Speaker 2: who discovered as Mr right there. Yes, thank you guys,
Speaker 2: Thank you. A couple more before we do some Q
Speaker 2: and A with you guys. Let's draw another one not
Speaker 2: the front row.
Speaker 7: Yeah all right, we're.
Speaker 2: Working our way to the back wall. What's your name, Dave?
Speaker 2: You have one a jesusas mug. Now, this mug has
Speaker 2: a beard in Jesus. But when you pour hot tea
Speaker 2: or coffee into it, his beard magically disappears. It is
Speaker 2: a genuine praise Jesus, miracle and congratulations.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much, thank you, you.
Speaker 4: Bet, thanks for coming up.
Speaker 2: Let me take a look and see what if I
Speaker 2: have one more here? Cute up I do. Let's do another? Uh,
Speaker 2: let's do another number.
Speaker 6: Eight?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, all right, shout it out. What's your first name? Alice? Alice?
Speaker 2: You know when sin, when sin has covered you, you
Speaker 2: need to be washed with Jesus. So you've got some
Speaker 2: Jesus so to wash away those sins. Congratulations, Alice, I'm
Speaker 2: so glad you came up. All right, No one I'm
Speaker 2: sure would agree with me. We're not Yoda. We don't
Speaker 2: have a ton of great wisdom. We do a lot
Speaker 2: of this, but I'm more interested in interaction. So we
Speaker 2: do have a roving microphone. If anyone has a comment
Speaker 2: or question, let's engage each other. Let's talk about the
Speaker 2: world that we live in and anything that's on your mind.
Speaker 2: Does anybody want to start? Anybody have any thoughts? I
Speaker 2: see a gentleman here in the center of the back
Speaker 2: section with his hand in the air. This is you.
Speaker 2: Guys are awesome, and that's maybe laugh my family laugh forever.
Speaker 3: You very awesome.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 8: If you were to ask right now, I know the
Speaker 8: subject at the moment that AI has been about your
Speaker 8: fout a year now. I work with it constantly working
Speaker 8: things along those lines. If you were asked a GPT
Speaker 8: five point six that came out of est today, vote
Speaker 8: God exists or not, and give you a hard answer
Speaker 8: on that, playing all the evidence.
Speaker 2: Empirical, that's philosophical and everything, guess what it would come
Speaker 2: back with.
Speaker 8: It comes out with a percentage depending on the of
Speaker 8: the prompt, it comes about sixty to eighty percent as.
Speaker 3: That God does not exist.
Speaker 5: It seems low.
Speaker 2: By questions. You know, there's what gold is a had
Speaker 2: in this.
Speaker 8: I mean the best advocates and you boil all that
Speaker 8: all that asking everything you asked a r AI right now,
Speaker 8: my grandma can ask right now, I cannot be answered
Speaker 8: right answered.
Speaker 2: So is it an advocate or is it dangerous? Or
Speaker 2: what are your off on the while he answers, I
Speaker 2: need to look for a second, Mike, real fast, Go ahead, brother, sure.
Speaker 3: So my concern on that is that if you don't
Speaker 3: get the answer you want from chat GPT, you'll go
Speaker 3: to different AI. They're already crafting AI specifically designed to
Speaker 3: lie to you about this issue or that. Right so,
Speaker 3: Elon Musk has decided to make his AI lie to
Speaker 3: you about racism. We covered a story recently on The
Speaker 3: Scathing Atheist that was a where somebody was making an
Speaker 3: AI that was designed to lie to you about Jesus.
Speaker 3: So my fear is that we are going to tend
Speaker 3: towards whatever gives us the answers we want, rather than
Speaker 3: whatever gives us the answers that are correct.
Speaker 5: And of course we're going to do that now with
Speaker 5: the em burder of.
Speaker 3: AI. Right so, people will say, you know, it's not
Speaker 3: just that my priest told me this, It's that the
Speaker 3: all knowing AI told me the thing it was programmed
Speaker 3: to tell me is.
Speaker 2: The thing that gets me is the people who were
Speaker 2: having affairs with their chatbot. They're leaving their spouses and
Speaker 2: going in these weird relationships with a chat baw, with
Speaker 2: chat GPT or whatever. There have been news reports there's
Speaker 2: one guy in his marriage is on the rocks. His
Speaker 2: wife is a strange because he disappears into some other
Speaker 2: parts of his life to talk to a non human.
Speaker 2: Does that speak to our desire for connection? But then
Speaker 2: we've got it feeding it back to us what we
Speaker 2: may want to hear, and then we were in the
Speaker 2: spheres of disinformation. It's funny, the more connected our world is,
Speaker 2: the more disconnected our world seems to be. I don't know,
Speaker 2: you know, I use AI to like clean up images,
Speaker 2: and I've used it. I used it on my taxes,
Speaker 2: you know. I mean I would have spent all day
Speaker 2: doing a P and L and trying to put all
Speaker 2: the numbers together, and I was able to feed it
Speaker 2: into AI and it was able to do the calculation
Speaker 2: in a way that made my life easier. But I
Speaker 2: also we've talked about this on the show. I'm fully
Speaker 2: aware of two major things. One is I know that
Speaker 2: it's stealing from creators and the people who are you know,
Speaker 2: I used to think technology would be doing menial work
Speaker 2: so we could make art, and instead technologies making art
Speaker 2: so we get fired from the menial job and have
Speaker 2: no work. You know, it's weird. I am a little
Speaker 2: concerned about the power issue. But I also think that
Speaker 2: there are whole religions already sprouting up around Ai. There
Speaker 2: are people who are worshiping at the churches of Ai
Speaker 2: in a sense, and that freaks me out, Like will
Speaker 2: we will worship almost anything? Yeah, well almost anything?
Speaker 3: You know, you're talking about people having romantic relationships with AI.
Speaker 3: I recently read an excellent book called The Yahoo Boys
Speaker 3: about Nigerian romance scammers, and he made the point and
Speaker 3: I thought was really interesting that chat GPT in so
Speaker 3: many ways is just a Nigerian romance scammer.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: It's something that'll tell you exactly what you want to hear,
Speaker 3: and it'll be all the as attentive as you want
Speaker 3: it to be. You just have to keep feeding it money, right,
Speaker 3: And that's one of the interesting Like chat GPT is putting.
Speaker 5: That scam out of business, So that's the one.
Speaker 3: You know, it's idiots drinking all our water, taking all
Speaker 3: our jobs. But Graham's a little bit safer from thinking
Speaker 3: that she's about to marry Keanu Reeves.
Speaker 5: So there's also that.
Speaker 2: Anybody else. I see a gentleman in the back here,
Speaker 2: and then I see someone here. We'll come back to
Speaker 2: you in just a moment.
Speaker 3: Love the shirt.
Speaker 2: Oh he's got a wait? Is this king atheist?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Nice? Okay, So I'm gonna go with the lighter question.
Speaker 2: I suspect.
Speaker 9: So I'm going to grant each of you the power
Speaker 9: to keep Donald Trump forever having been considered a viable
Speaker 9: candidate for president, let alone being elected. But to do it,
Speaker 9: you have to wipe either the Super Nintendo or the
Speaker 9: Sagais from history that never existed? Which one and why?
Speaker 9: I'm really curious what you think though, of Seth You'll.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure I understand the question. Rephrase it, use
Speaker 2: small words, use your hands, breaks yourself.
Speaker 9: So Donald Trump bad? You could stop him, like John Connor. Yes,
Speaker 9: But to do that, you have to either wipe out
Speaker 9: the Sega Genesis so it never went to market, or
Speaker 9: the Super Nintendo so it never went to market. That's
Speaker 9: the side effect of stopping Donald Trump.
Speaker 2: I'd nick them both and used Calliko vision.
Speaker 8: But that's just men.
Speaker 3: Yeah, all right, So I'm gonna stand I'm gonna I'm
Speaker 3: gonna sit here and pretend that I'm not appalled that
Speaker 3: he just talked about getting rid of two generation four
Speaker 3: consoles in favor of a generation two consoles. Doesn't even
Speaker 3: make sensive, Seth. But yeah, no, obviously you get rid
Speaker 3: of the Sega Genesis. I mean, come on, say it
Speaker 3: was super Nintendo gave us so many classic games. Second
Speaker 3: Genesis just had really good marketing.
Speaker 2: Anybody here having in television, anybody remembering television back in.
Speaker 3: The day, I'm same, same, yeah, yeah, spend a whole
Speaker 3: lot of money on their marketing.
Speaker 2: There was someone over here with their hand up. Let's
Speaker 2: go there. Next. I've got John. He has big mike
Speaker 2: and a small mic. The small one is for our
Speaker 2: video camera, so I can have that. So if he
Speaker 2: holds two close to your face, he's not insane, he's practical.
Speaker 2: He is the godless engineer. Go ahead, Seth. I've been
Speaker 2: listening to you for a while, but I don't really
Speaker 2: know you.
Speaker 3: Noah, so I don't know you either.
Speaker 5: It's fine, but this has been.
Speaker 2: Bugging me for a while. Your name, no illusions, And
Speaker 2: I just was threeus. If it's a play on words,
Speaker 2: if that's your real name.
Speaker 3: That's it would be crazy if that was my name,
Speaker 3: and I did this job on it.
Speaker 5: So it's no, it's a it's a fake name.
Speaker 3: In the heart part about coming up with a fake
Speaker 3: name is that I had to come up with a
Speaker 3: fake name that would work for my wife as well.
Speaker 5: So I'm no illusions.
Speaker 3: She's loosened delusions son.
Speaker 2: And if there's somebody more epic, there's anybody more epic
Speaker 2: than Noah, it's loosened to she is a fool very leader.
Speaker 3: Who is next?
Speaker 2: And I'm going to ramble on for just a second. Oh,
Speaker 2: we have someone here on the corner. I will say
Speaker 2: that to be a partner of an activist, those people
Speaker 2: deserve a very special kind of award. Even when you're
Speaker 2: not activisting, you're thinking about activisting, and if all of
Speaker 2: a sudden you realized you weren't thinking about activisting, then
Speaker 2: you feel guilty and horrible for not activisting, and so
Speaker 2: you go back and it's twenty four to seven. It's life.
Speaker 2: Balance is hard for activists, and I think many of
Speaker 2: the people in this room, even if you're not on
Speaker 2: YouTuber podcasting. You're doing high profile stuff in your own circle.
Speaker 2: You have an activist nature. You want change the world, right,
Speaker 2: even if it's just in your circle, You want to
Speaker 2: change things. That's an activist nature, and burnout's a problem
Speaker 2: for us. Life balance is a challenge for us. And
Speaker 2: I'm sure many of you were nodding your heads at
Speaker 2: me saying, yeah, I know exactly what that's like. So yes,
Speaker 2: we do see you go ahead.
Speaker 10: So I just want to say it's cool that you
Speaker 10: guys came to this specific place because, very long story short,
Speaker 10: I was in a catastrophic thing a couple of years ago,
Speaker 10: and I got reconnected to some family that I hadn't
Speaker 10: talked to in a long time, and I got invited
Speaker 10: to a production here that was a ballet, and I thought,
Speaker 10: innocent enough, that's cool, some relatives I haven't seen in
Speaker 10: a long time. But it was all for these homeschooled
Speaker 10: like Catholic cult and I look a little different. So
Speaker 10: it was just a really interesting experience. But it was
Speaker 10: here in this exact room a year ago, like Christmas
Speaker 10: time or something, So I just thought you guys might
Speaker 10: think that was cool.
Speaker 2: No, we came to realign the cheap Yeah. Right, so
Speaker 2: the chakras are now imbalanced.
Speaker 3: Well not yet. We have to do a little ballet.
Speaker 3: So when you first said that, I was just I
Speaker 3: was sure you're gonna tell me it was one of
Speaker 3: that fool on Gong show or something like that. Maybe
Speaker 3: even worse.
Speaker 2: We have somebody up there. Okay, I'm looking into the spotlight.
Speaker 2: Forgive me. Go ahead, speak nice and loud for us.
Speaker 11: Can you hear me?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 5: But that was your question. I'm sorry, Seth.
Speaker 11: I have a problem with my in laws at times
Speaker 11: overstepping their boundaries on religion.
Speaker 2: How do you handle that?
Speaker 11: Like we try to keep we try to keep the
Speaker 11: boundaries there and let them know, no religion at the table,
Speaker 11: but it doesn't work and they're very like pushback on it.
Speaker 5: So how do you deal with that?
Speaker 2: Did I say that I'm not a life coach, psychologist
Speaker 2: or a qualified counselor did I say that a few
Speaker 2: minutes ago? I have opinions. It's amazing the permission that
Speaker 2: blood relatives give themselves to do and say things that
Speaker 2: we would never allow from anybody else. And I don't
Speaker 2: want to get too heavy, but I remember when I
Speaker 2: was deconstructing, and everybody in my hardcore evangelical family went
Speaker 2: into panic mode. Prodigal has to be brought home. He's
Speaker 2: going to go to hell. Mom says, you're embarrassing the family,
Speaker 2: you're tarnishing the family name. Blah blah blah. And it
Speaker 2: was just a barrage, and they were crafty. One day
Speaker 2: would be a text that talked about a verse or this,
Speaker 2: or a correction in the Lord, or the next day
Speaker 2: it would be a link to a sermon video, or
Speaker 2: she would give me a book, or she would threaten
Speaker 2: me with hell or Dad. You know, my father said,
Speaker 2: there can be no fellowship with an unbeliever. Nothing else
Speaker 2: can be enjoyed until we solved the eternal problem. And
Speaker 2: I remember they would say and do the worst stuff
Speaker 2: thinking and they were doing it in love. And I
Speaker 2: remember abiding that in my own life for the longest time,
Speaker 2: under the excuse, well, they're your parents and you need
Speaker 2: to respect your elders. And I finally came to a
Speaker 2: point in my own life when I thought, I'm not
Speaker 2: doing any of this to them. I'm not pounding on
Speaker 2: their door, I'm not telling them to change the way
Speaker 2: they live. I'm not saying live your life my way.
Speaker 2: This is a total double standard. And so I set
Speaker 2: a boundary that was a harder line. I got so
Speaker 2: tired of the constant sermonizing and the guilt and the
Speaker 2: shame and the boundary crossing that I said, all right, look,
Speaker 2: first of all, do you believe that Jesus can do anything? Yes?
Speaker 2: Do you believe God answers prayer? Yes? Have you prayed
Speaker 2: for me to return to Jesus. Yes, you're off the hook.
Speaker 2: You have done your pardon. So now let God do
Speaker 2: what God does. And this journey is going to be
Speaker 2: between me and God. If God reveals himself, I promise
Speaker 2: I will be open to it. But this conversation no
Speaker 2: longer includes you. That never works. It never works, but
Speaker 2: it's a tool to essentially show them how little they
Speaker 2: believe in the power of prayer. And the second thing is,
Speaker 2: if you do or say this kind of thing again
Speaker 2: against my wishes, you were going to force my hand
Speaker 2: to draw a hard line and I will have to
Speaker 2: remove you from my circle. Now that was a hard
Speaker 2: decision I made for me. I can't tell you when
Speaker 2: and where to draw that line, because that's a cost
Speaker 2: benefit that only you can make access to you, access
Speaker 2: to your children, access to your life. How much are
Speaker 2: you're willing to endure or abide? But I'll tell you,
Speaker 2: the problem that is happening is not your fault. It's theirs.
Speaker 2: And I think respect starts with self respect. And if
Speaker 2: they start to really push in and say toxic and
Speaker 2: intrusive things, especially when the kids are in play, my
Speaker 2: first thought is if they're disrespecting your boundary, you would
Speaker 2: have every right to step back and say, okay, well,
Speaker 2: I'm going to focus on the family that does act
Speaker 2: with respect, courtesy, empathy and all of that and isn't
Speaker 2: trying to make me live my life their way. It's
Speaker 2: a tough answer for me because I think everybody's so complicated.
Speaker 2: Everybody's answer is going to be different. Does that remotely
Speaker 2: help you? I just think at some point, if it
Speaker 2: gets too intense, explain to them here is the line.
Speaker 2: I mean, here is exactly what it is, so you
Speaker 2: know what it is and you can't miss it. And
Speaker 2: then if they cross it and you decide I'm gonna
Speaker 2: have to withdraw, that is not your fault. They forced
Speaker 2: your hand because respect starts with self respect, and boundaries
Speaker 2: are important in our personal lives. I'll bet there are
Speaker 2: people in this room we've had to draw hard boundaries
Speaker 2: with loved ones and it hurt, and you felt guilty
Speaker 2: and you thought, am I doing the right thing? And
Speaker 2: blah blah blah, And if we just have one more conversation,
Speaker 2: maybe I can change their minds and maybe they'll leave
Speaker 2: me alone. Maybe a few years the past, we'll try again.
Speaker 2: It blows up in your face. It's brutal. Families are tough,
Speaker 2: and I don't have the answer. If I did have
Speaker 2: the answer, i'd be talking to my mother. But unfortunately,
Speaker 2: you know, we're now contact and it's because religion has
Speaker 2: divided us in that way. I don't know no idea
Speaker 2: of any wisdom. On top of that, no, I will say, okay,
Speaker 2: well thanks.
Speaker 3: Anyway, I wouldn't call anything that I say wisdom. But
Speaker 3: my what worked with my dad He liked to bring
Speaker 3: up religion constantly, and I don't think for him it
Speaker 3: was just more of a jib, you know. It was
Speaker 3: more of a like i'm gonna get you, I'm gonna
Speaker 3: get you kind of thing. And so what I told
Speaker 3: him is like, all right, I'm keeping score every time
Speaker 3: you bring up God You've given me permission to just
Speaker 3: toss an atheist argument out at you whenever I feel
Speaker 3: like it, right, and so I would keep I would
Speaker 3: tell him at the end of being like, hey, I've
Speaker 3: got four now, and then I just, you know, throw
Speaker 3: something out there, like, you know, I throw the problem
Speaker 3: of evil out when we're having a dinner conversation.
Speaker 5: I'm like, I still have three. And eventually.
Speaker 3: He realized that I argue about this ship for a
Speaker 3: living and he doesn't.
Speaker 2: So Statistically, the two demographics who know the Bible the
Speaker 2: best are Jews. And if you want to know the
Speaker 2: history and the scripture of Christianity in this country especially,
Speaker 2: you usually don't talk to a Christian. I find that fascinating.
Speaker 2: I got to share an anecdote real fast, and I've
Speaker 2: told it a few times. But there may be some
Speaker 2: of the room that might benefit, you might benefit I
Speaker 2: don't know, but we've got a minute, and I think
Speaker 2: it's I think it's relevant. So everybody else in my
Speaker 2: family hardcore religious. My mother, my father is still alive,
Speaker 2: and my parents are theologian level believers. They taught university
Speaker 2: level theology. My mother wrote a Greek New Testament study guide.
Speaker 2: They met at Oral Roberts University. Oral Roberts, the scam evangelist,
Speaker 2: tent revival healer, dude, you know. And they were hardcore, right,
Speaker 2: And that was my upbringing. That's how intense it was,
Speaker 2: So you can imagine how intense my impostasy was. And
Speaker 2: so I cousin named Sue who lived out of town.
Speaker 2: She lived in Chicago, and she was going to be
Speaker 2: in town. And so my sister called and said, Hey, cousin,
Speaker 2: Sue's going to be in town. We're having dinner at
Speaker 2: our house. And it's been, you know, a long time
Speaker 2: since you've seen her. Would you like to come over
Speaker 2: and have dinner? And I said okay, So I nervously
Speaker 2: went and we all sat around the table for dinner.
Speaker 2: So it's Sue and her husband, Mark, and then there's
Speaker 2: my parents and all my siblings and everybody's all around here,
Speaker 2: and Sue starts to catch up. Now I haven't seen
Speaker 2: Sue in fifteen years. So Sue's asking everybody, so what
Speaker 2: do you do? Well? I work for here, I work
Speaker 2: for this. Oh yeah, we go to church just down
Speaker 2: the road. We got back from a mission trip. Oh
Speaker 2: that's interesting. How about you? What do you do, Oh,
Speaker 2: what do you do? Now? I'm sitting here going fuck,
Speaker 2: because I know it's going to come around to me,
Speaker 2: and I'm going to have to decide how to respond
Speaker 2: with all of the people in the room, especially my
Speaker 2: totally humiliated mother and father who've been sending me sermons
Speaker 2: and threats and everything else. So finally it comes to
Speaker 2: around to me, and she said, so, Seth, what is
Speaker 2: it that you do? And I said, oh, I'm a
Speaker 2: I'm a video producer and podcaster, and I do a
Speaker 2: lot of audio video work. Yeah, that's what I do anyway.
Speaker 2: And then I kind of handhandedly, kind of shifted over
Speaker 2: and I said, you know, and they do a lot
Speaker 2: of you know, I don't know, I forgot exactly how
Speaker 2: I did it, but I could tell Sue was not
Speaker 2: satisfied with my inside. So, Sue, Seth, I'm going to
Speaker 2: come back to you. But you audio video? Are you podcasting?
Speaker 11: Really?
Speaker 2: What do you podcast about? Well? We talked in depth
Speaker 2: about religious issues, and I could tell she wasn't satisfied
Speaker 2: with that. And in that moment, I had an epiphany.
Speaker 2: Lightning freaking struck me and it almost made me mad.
Speaker 2: I thought everybody else at this table is getting without
Speaker 2: a pause. They're getting to be their authentic selves. I'm
Speaker 2: the one sitting on my hands trying to My job
Speaker 2: is not to keep them comfortable. I'm not ashamed of
Speaker 2: what I do. This is my authentic self. So she
Speaker 2: asked me again, we'll tell me more about what you do.
Speaker 2: And I said, I host the most popular atheist podcast
Speaker 2: in the world. And I waited, Mom and Dad. I
Speaker 2: could see him sink a little bit. Nobody freaked, nobody
Speaker 2: blew up. It didn't go as south like I thought
Speaker 2: it might, and it could have all right, but it
Speaker 2: was liberating. Now here's the interesting part. They go back
Speaker 2: to Chicago and I get an email from Sue and
Speaker 2: she said, you know it's interesting, but Mark's been on
Speaker 2: kind of a journey out of the Catholic church. He's
Speaker 2: been struggling with some stuff and had some questions. And
Speaker 2: I bought him your book and could I give him
Speaker 2: your email so you guys could have a conversation. Hell, yes,
Speaker 2: you can have my email. You never know, you never
Speaker 2: know who's watching, you never know who's doubting, you never
Speaker 2: know who's deconstructing, you never know who's on a journey.
Speaker 2: And me being my authentic self provided a point of
Speaker 2: connection which might help him better be his authentic self.
Speaker 2: And that's something that I think we all need to remember.
Speaker 2: Not everybody can go public, not everybody can be forward.
Speaker 2: We're playing chess, not checkers. I get it, you're not
Speaker 2: a coward if you're playing the long game and you're
Speaker 2: being more silent. But I will say, if you can
Speaker 2: say something, you never know. You never know what sibling,
Speaker 2: what parent, what child, what neighbor, what friend, what coworker
Speaker 2: is going through something internally and they find out that
Speaker 2: you are on that journey and they reach out, and
Speaker 2: I think, honestly, it's shit like that that changes the world. Anyway.
Speaker 2: Thank you for letting me tell that story. So anybody
Speaker 2: else want to talk about anything? Oh now, we're cooking
Speaker 2: right here, right here on the front row. Let's do
Speaker 2: this when first, By the way, as they travel, thanks
Speaker 2: to Casey and John for their unbelievable help. Chrissy Helton,
Speaker 2: you are an angel on earth. All the prizes we're
Speaker 2: giving away and the programs you're holding in your hand,
Speaker 2: and so much of this stuff. She has helped me navigate.
Speaker 2: She has been the glue. And I tell you, whatever
Speaker 2: she's paying her. They're not paying her anything. But if
Speaker 2: I could, I would pay her more. Okay, go ahead,
Speaker 2: go ahead, Just making sure I'm holding at the right distance.
Speaker 12: I know more about Noah than Seth, and that's not
Speaker 12: a dig I just haven't had the time to listen
Speaker 12: to a lot of it Noah. A while back, you
Speaker 12: had the Dans on the God of Movies for Mormon Month,
Speaker 12: Dan McClellan, and I can't remember the other Dan's last name,
Speaker 12: given that Dan McClellan is a professed theist. He believes
Speaker 12: in a God, but he's separated from the Mormon Church
Speaker 12: pretty thoroughly.
Speaker 2: They all dis avow him because he writes books that
Speaker 2: pissed him off to no end.
Speaker 12: But one of the cliches in the atheist community is,
Speaker 12: if you want to be an atheist, read the Bible.
Speaker 12: And a lot of Dan's books and a lot of
Speaker 12: his videos are about debunking all the theocratic nonsense that
Speaker 12: the Christians put out in this country, specifically all the
Speaker 12: stuff that get wrong. Given that he's sort of taking
Speaker 12: down Christianity from the other side. Meanwhile, we're on the
Speaker 12: outside and we're just chucking the biggest stones we can
Speaker 12: at him.
Speaker 5: But is there sort of a conflict of interest in.
Speaker 2: Being on the same side with someone liked it?
Speaker 3: I love Dan.
Speaker 12: I have his book The Bible, said, so, it's a
Speaker 12: fantastic book. And I bought it from my young nephew
Speaker 12: who had questions about the Bible, and I was just like, listen,
Speaker 12: I don't have the time of the patients, and you
Speaker 12: don't know how to read the Bible yet because it's
Speaker 12: got a lot of vows and these, and you're still
Speaker 12: on whatever Nancy Drew is now. So I said, you
Speaker 12: read this book, and then if you have any more
Speaker 12: questions and you still want to go to church in
Speaker 12: our small town, then you can ask me more questions,
Speaker 12: and I can tell you what I've done for the
Speaker 12: past twenty years of being an atheist. But is there
Speaker 12: a conflict of interests being on the same side as
Speaker 12: someone like Dan McClellan, because he's technically arguing for the
Speaker 12: side of them. He's like, I believe there is a
Speaker 12: God or a creator, however vague they feel like getting
Speaker 12: at that time of day. But they'll say I believe
Speaker 12: there isn't but religion is being used wrongly. Noah, in
Speaker 12: your book, you say, religion isn't used wrong, religion is wrong.
Speaker 5: Yes, absolutely.
Speaker 3: So before we had Dan on the show, I did
Speaker 3: a lot of for lack of a better term, soul
Speaker 3: surging about promoting somebody you know on the show that
Speaker 3: that is is a believer and argue in favor of
Speaker 3: the Bible. And I think he softens it, right, so
Speaker 3: he makes it a little bit more palatable to progressive people,
Speaker 3: which is ultimately, I think, against our goals. Right. So
Speaker 3: I did a Dio tribe a long time ago about
Speaker 3: the progressive Christian who thinks that they can move Christianity
Speaker 3: beyond it's big a try or beyond whatever is holding
Speaker 3: it back.
Speaker 5: And I likened that to picking up the anchor and
Speaker 5: moving it a little bit further.
Speaker 3: But you're still anchored, right, You're still anchored to this
Speaker 3: old book that is, you know, morally reprehensible and this
Speaker 3: religion that you know, people seem to think that there's
Speaker 3: some way of doing it that will be beneficial to
Speaker 3: the world, but nobody's figured that out in two thousand years, right,
Speaker 3: So yeah, I get where you're where you're coming from.
Speaker 3: And ultimately what I've the way I justified it in
Speaker 3: my own mind is that I know that Dan has
Speaker 3: a pretty substantial audience, and my hope is that people
Speaker 3: who are listening to Dan explain the Bible who are
Speaker 3: not yet atheists are really primed for it. So I
Speaker 3: want to, you know, wanted to try to help pull
Speaker 3: some more of their audience in towards us. But yes,
Speaker 3: definitely always conflicted about that aspect.
Speaker 2: Though it is a little frustrating to see, and I
Speaker 2: appreciate their values, but we're seeing a lot of this
Speaker 2: like James Tallerico down in Texas, who's like, my Jesus
Speaker 2: would never judge gay people, and my Jesus would never
Speaker 2: send anybody to hell, and my Jesus is the God
Speaker 2: of love. And I appreciate the sentiment behind it. Pastor
Speaker 2: or he's a minister, I think John Pavlobitt. He continues
Speaker 2: to talk about how Jesus never ever condemned gay people,
Speaker 2: and I appreciate the sentiment. But have you read your
Speaker 2: Old and New Testament, right, I mean I had. I'm
Speaker 2: literally this chapter in verse about stone to death and
Speaker 2: they will not achieve heaven and they're an abomination and
Speaker 2: blah blah blah. And so I find that they've made
Speaker 2: a God almost in their own image. And it's hard
Speaker 2: to know what to do because you appreciate the humanism
Speaker 2: behind their o motive. But I mean, are are they
Speaker 2: are not really selling biblical Christianity, are they?
Speaker 3: Well, you know, interestingly enough so the book that you
Speaker 3: mentioned the Bible says, So Dan tackles that question, and
Speaker 3: you know, does the Bible condemn gay people? And it
Speaker 3: comes very forcefully on the side that yes, it absolutely does.
Speaker 3: So he is defending a form of Christianity that, you know,
Speaker 3: steps far enough away from the Bible to I guess
Speaker 3: ignore that or or forgive that or but there's a
Speaker 3: point where you're ste If you're stepping away from the
Speaker 3: foundational documentation of your religion, then what are you stepping into,
Speaker 3: right if not atheism? So he's at least honest about
Speaker 3: what the Bible says in that sense, But I've never
Speaker 3: heard him address the Well, then how do you justify
Speaker 3: using this book as the foundation of your religion concept.
Speaker 2: Joyce Smeier, the evangelist, is coming to my town next month.
Speaker 2: Joyce Smyer, who has made millions of dollars as an evangelist.
Speaker 2: And I'm not going to do it, but I am.
Speaker 2: I fantasize about standing in front of the parking lot
Speaker 2: where people are pulling in with the placard reading two
Speaker 2: Timothy that says, I do not permit a woman to
Speaker 2: teach or have authority over a man. She must be silent,
Speaker 2: Joyce Meyer, must be silent in the churches. I fantasize
Speaker 2: about it, Joyce Meier. Protest. Let's see was there anybody
Speaker 2: else I've done one on the front I want to do.
Speaker 2: Let's do this. Where are you John, Let's do this,
Speaker 2: gentleman in blue, and then we'll do the the person behind.
Speaker 6: All right, So you guys came here for the arc
Speaker 6: encounter protest much appreciated. While you're in town, I think
Speaker 6: either of you will make a pilgrim. Pilgrim a little
Speaker 6: ways up north to see what's become of Big Butter Jesus.
Speaker 6: What you know about Big Butter Jesus.
Speaker 2: No, he's wait wait, wait, what is what?
Speaker 5: To go up to Interstate seventy five?
Speaker 3: What maybe thirty ish miles up north?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the Solid Rock Church.
Speaker 6: They have a sixty foot tall Jesus statue standing by
Speaker 6: the side of a lake, reaching out to hug the
Speaker 6: passers by the original one burned down after it was
Speaker 6: struck by lightning.
Speaker 2: I remember that, I remember that, Yeah, yeah, that was
Speaker 2: touchdown Jesus's called a touchdown Jesus.
Speaker 6: Touchdown Jesus or big butter Jesus. Now you think he's
Speaker 6: zombie Jesus, five dollars foot long Jesus. Hugby Jesus.
Speaker 3: You go, He's a lord of many names. We recently
Speaker 3: talked about that on the show, and I didn't realize
Speaker 3: we were that.
Speaker 2: Close to it.
Speaker 6: You got to see it while you're here.
Speaker 2: The Lord works in mysterious Well, there was a young
Speaker 2: was there a young lady behind you? And then I
Speaker 2: promise I'll come back to use it.
Speaker 13: I think that any belief could be interpreted by like,
Speaker 13: depending on your perspective coming at it. I think any
Speaker 13: belief could be or lack thereof could be interpreted as
Speaker 13: a product of indoctrination.
Speaker 2: So how do you how do you.
Speaker 13: To individually perceive things in a way that like the
Speaker 13: difference between incorrect information and correct information? How do you
Speaker 13: distinguish between the two, And how do you think that
Speaker 13: we as a society could distinguish between the two as
Speaker 13: people who are amateurs and not like professionals on certain topics,
Speaker 13: how could we maybe understand what is true and what is.
Speaker 3: Untrue, explain epistemology. So that's what science is, right, Sciences
Speaker 3: is the method by which we determine that which is true.
Speaker 3: So we can't be experts on all the sciences, all
Speaker 3: the sciences. Rather, so the best we can do is,
Speaker 3: you know, unless we want to develop our own expertise,
Speaker 3: is to trust in the consensus of scientists. Right And luckily,
Speaker 3: for almost every question that we have, there is a
Speaker 3: consensus among scientists. And for those ones where we don't
Speaker 3: have an answer or where we don't have a consensus,
Speaker 3: it's okay to not know too. But when it comes
Speaker 3: to just you know, like how do you know that
Speaker 3: you're following the right beliefs versus being indoctrinated into a
Speaker 3: set of beliefs, I think it's far easier for Seth
Speaker 3: and I to make that determination because nobody, no organization,
Speaker 3: no institution was trying to push us into this in
Speaker 3: this direction right. In fact, they were pushing us quite
Speaker 3: the opposite direction. So you know, it's it's hard to
Speaker 3: be indoctrinated, you know, And if there's not an doctor Nader,
Speaker 3: but I think, you know proper pistemology and science that
Speaker 3: it works.
Speaker 2: You know the difference I think too between I was
Speaker 2: taught what to think, I wasn't ever trained how to
Speaker 2: think right and the training of the mind to think right.
Speaker 2: Science is not a book with a bunch of facts.
Speaker 2: Science is a process. We can all be scientists. And
Speaker 2: I remember I didn't I knew of Carl Sagan, but
Speaker 2: I didn't really fall in love with the voice of
Speaker 2: Sagan the long after he had died, and I remember thinking, whoa,
Speaker 2: you know science? We were all doing science every day
Speaker 2: to some degree. We have this imperfect solution of the
Speaker 2: experts peer reviewing the experts and then they have to
Speaker 2: course correct and whatnot. But I will say that I
Speaker 2: have a whole new respect for experts in their field,
Speaker 2: genuine trained scientists, reputable, credible scientist in an era when
Speaker 2: our Department of Education has never one day taught in
Speaker 2: a classroom and ran a world wrestling federation. When the
Speaker 2: guy running the department at Homeland Security is a plumber, right,
Speaker 2: I mean we are. When the guy running the health
Speaker 2: department has no health credentials whatsoever.
Speaker 5: He's a negative health predict. Swings in suit.
Speaker 2: There's a war on expertise, and I have become I
Speaker 2: just saw that Neil Schubman was just elected to head
Speaker 2: up the National Academy of Sciences, and I was cheering
Speaker 2: at my computer. But you know, it's imperfect, because people
Speaker 2: are imperfect. But I think the training of the mind,
Speaker 2: learning to watch scientists who are checking each other, who
Speaker 2: watches the watchers. It's a far from perfect system, but
Speaker 2: it's sure a lot better than you know, going out
Speaker 2: and having some homeopath on TikTok tell us to sit
Speaker 2: on the floor and each shark cartilage and align our
Speaker 2: energy meridians, you know, with no qualifications whatsoever. I don't
Speaker 2: know if that remotely answers your question. I want to
Speaker 2: do there? Did you have a question. I promise I
Speaker 2: would come back to you before we moved on. I
Speaker 2: want to be true to my word. And then I'm
Speaker 2: not being rude. I don't have a clock in the back,
Speaker 2: so I'm checking my watch. By the way, I want
Speaker 2: to say thank you to Morgan, who is our audio
Speaker 2: video person today. It's funny when you do av correctly.
Speaker 2: No one knows you exist, but I see you. Morgan.
Speaker 2: Everyone please a round of applause.
Speaker 3: For Morgan and if anybody's curious, that's not my Morgan.
Speaker 3: It's just a different Morgan that does av so smooth.
Speaker 2: Today's been smooth. Go ahead.
Speaker 7: Okay, you've both of you have been doing this for
Speaker 7: a while. I was wondering if you would share the
Speaker 7: silliest argument that you ever been given for the existence
Speaker 7: of God.
Speaker 2: Okay, the silliest are giment we've ever heard.
Speaker 5: Oh, I've got a great one.
Speaker 3: So early on a listener reached out to me with
Speaker 3: us when we'd only been doing maybe fifty sixty episodes
Speaker 3: at that point, which now seems very early on, and
Speaker 3: he asked, you know, his question was about novel arguments
Speaker 3: and how you handle an argument you've never heard before.
Speaker 3: But the example he gave was incredible. It was and
Speaker 3: apparently this is a well known argument amongst some really
Speaker 3: desperate apologists. It's the pro thrumbrin pro thumbing.
Speaker 5: I don't remember the ny of it. There's a protein,
Speaker 5: there's a protein.
Speaker 3: That your body produces that the production is at its
Speaker 3: peak at the exact time that the Bible tells you
Speaker 3: to get circumcised, right, and so the so some people
Speaker 3: have gone in and said oh you know that that
Speaker 3: chemical It helps in reducing pain, perception or something. So
Speaker 3: God and his wisdom made it peak at the exact
Speaker 3: same time he wanted you.
Speaker 5: To lop piece of your dick off.
Speaker 3: And I just, first of all, that's not true, right,
Speaker 3: Like the argument like when you actually talk to someone
Speaker 3: who knows what they're talking about, that's it's not They
Speaker 3: don't even have the peak production correct.
Speaker 5: Nothing about it is true or anything.
Speaker 3: But my point on it to the listener that wrote
Speaker 3: to me was like, so, so what if when you
Speaker 3: presented with an argument like that, then you have to
Speaker 3: ask that person. Okay, So if I were able to
Speaker 3: show you that pro Thumbren or whatever the hell it's called,
Speaker 3: actually peaked four days earlier, would you stop believing in God?
Speaker 3: Because if not, then why the hell do you think
Speaker 3: this would convince me?
Speaker 9: Right?
Speaker 3: Why would the opposite be convincing. I don't think I've
Speaker 3: come across one stupider than that. You know.
Speaker 2: The one that sticks in my head is not specifically
Speaker 2: about God. It has to do with Noah's arct get
Speaker 2: the YouTuber's name, but he had a video proving that
Speaker 2: the moon was proof the global flood happened during the
Speaker 2: time of Noah. He said, he said, no, no, no.
Speaker 2: He said that the craters in the moon were created
Speaker 2: when the water splashing through the firmament flooding the Earth.
Speaker 2: They littered the waves splashed up so far that the
Speaker 2: water went into the cosmos, turned to ice and traveled
Speaker 2: all the way to the moon and created all the
Speaker 2: craters of the moon.
Speaker 5: Why are there craters on the other side?
Speaker 2: Then I ask Erica gots It Gibbon about this, and
Speaker 2: she said, oh, I've heard this argument. We have a
Speaker 2: name for it. We call it lunar bukake. More prizes
Speaker 2: and more great interaction from our Cincinnati audience. The audio
Speaker 2: of the event on July eleventh continues. Next, let's give
Speaker 2: away some free crap real quick.
Speaker 8: That we.
Speaker 2: All right, everybody gets your raffle tickets out, and then
Speaker 2: we'll finish with a little more time together and uh
Speaker 2: and hopefully we'll we'll we'll all be there. So grab
Speaker 2: you a number, John.
Speaker 3: Oh, we got three, five, seven, two.
Speaker 2: Oh, we've got someone. Now I don't have a slide
Speaker 2: for this one. Fortunately it's big enough. No, I'm gonna
Speaker 2: have you take an edge if you are looking to
Speaker 2: be comfortable and commune with the devil. Come on, somebody
Speaker 2: take a picture. This is a primo moment if anybody
Speaker 2: wants to sleep with Miss McConnell, come on up here,
Speaker 2: all right, stand next to NOA. Somebody take a picture
Speaker 2: of this. Okay, I got to jump in here. It
Speaker 2: just occurred to me. You cannot see a Ouiji board blanket.
Speaker 2: I think it was like an eight x ten piece
Speaker 2: of fabric that was a Ouiji board. So that's what
Speaker 2: you're that's what you're missing. And congratulations to you. What's
Speaker 2: your first name, Laura?
Speaker 8: Laura?
Speaker 2: Thank you so much. Laura. All right, and because we're
Speaker 2: in the zone of comfort, let's do one more. Give
Speaker 2: me a number. John.
Speaker 3: If it had been the person next to Laura, that
Speaker 3: would have been hilarious.
Speaker 2: Bye, we have someone, well, yell out, what's your name?
Speaker 3: Glenn?
Speaker 2: Well, Glenn? I know everybody needs respite in these stressful days.
Speaker 2: You've heard of a neck pillow. Today you have won
Speaker 2: a necronomicon pillow. That's right. Every day you can sit
Speaker 2: back and rest upon the Book of the dead. So
Speaker 2: congratulations to you.
Speaker 3: This is zero street four four five four four, Oh,
Speaker 3: it's April.
Speaker 2: You don't have to come up if you don't want.
Speaker 2: What's your first name?
Speaker 3: Oh it's April, Well April.
Speaker 2: It's serendipitous that this prize ties into a few of
Speaker 2: the conversations that we have been having, and we would
Speaker 2: like to give you some inspiration to take with you.
Speaker 2: Signed by Noah and myself. It is the Kinham Daily Devotional.
Speaker 3: Right here, just wherever, right by his face, just right
Speaker 3: next to his face, so I had to inscribe it.
Speaker 2: Yours in Christ, give me another one. Brother, We've got
Speaker 2: looks like three left, and then we'll fellowship in the
Speaker 2: Lord for a little while.
Speaker 3: Good Altar Coombe are exert.
Speaker 14: More.
Speaker 2: Oh, we've got somebody in the back. Wonderful. Well, this
Speaker 2: is a very special special prize. I heard about this
Speaker 2: a long time ago. Someone took the stories of the
Speaker 2: Bible and accurate, accurate descripture depicted those stories using legos.
Speaker 2: It is known as the Brick Testament or also the
Speaker 2: brick Bible. I don't know if you want this signed
Speaker 2: or not. Do you want it? You want to? Do
Speaker 2: you want us to I'll tell you what. Uh, let
Speaker 2: me grab you after the show, will grab Jesus John. Wow,
Speaker 2: this is a movie I'm gonna show you a couple
Speaker 2: of slides some images from the Brick Bible for you,
Speaker 2: and I think you're gonna just love it. Wonderful. What
Speaker 2: was your first name? Mary? Mary? I'm so glad I'm
Speaker 2: not the only one here with a biblical name, So
Speaker 2: between you and me and Noah and John were covered.
Speaker 3: And I named Mary because my birthday is the Immaculate
Speaker 3: Conception day.
Speaker 2: Your birthday is the day of the Immaculate Conception. Catholic,
Speaker 2: Catholic for Catholic. Wow, I thought I felt the Catholic
Speaker 2: guilt on you when you walked up here. I thought
Speaker 2: I felt the congratulations to you. Okay, I'm gonna have
Speaker 2: to come over here and set this up using my laptop,
Speaker 2: but I wanted to show you a few of the
Speaker 2: images from the Brick Testament. Now, I think this is
Speaker 2: an amazing deconstruction tool because when you see these stories
Speaker 2: in the format we're used to the oil paintings and
Speaker 2: we hear them told at Sunday School, we don't really
Speaker 2: think about it that much, but when you see the
Speaker 2: stories depicted with toys, it draws a circle around how
Speaker 2: wacky this stuff really is. So from the Book of Genesis,
Speaker 2: we have Adam and Eve in the garden after they
Speaker 2: experienced the shame of their got very angry. Yahweh. In
Speaker 2: the background, we've got a little eve cleavage coming out
Speaker 2: over the Genesis Chapter thirty two, Jacob wrussels with God.
Speaker 2: God's doing some kind of move on him. I don't know.
Speaker 2: Of course, you can't talk about the Old Testament without
Speaker 2: talking about Noah's ark, complete with a dinosaur coming out
Speaker 2: of the top. And after they loaded the boat, then
Speaker 2: the rains came and they were all, it drives it home,
Speaker 2: doesn't I mean, just you see it, you actually see it. Exodus,
Speaker 2: chapter three, God appears to Moses in the form of
Speaker 2: a burning bush. Now this is my favorite part of
Speaker 2: the Brick Bible. So you know the story about King
Speaker 2: Saul telling David, all right, if you want my daughter's
Speaker 2: hand in marriage, you got to go into battle and
Speaker 2: you've got to slice off the foreskins of one hundred Philistines.
Speaker 2: David says, fine, I'm not going to just give you
Speaker 2: one hundred. I'm gonna do two hundred Philistine foreskins. And
Speaker 2: we see it in Lego. And if it wasn't enough
Speaker 2: to see the chop we get to see him counting
Speaker 2: them out in Saul's kingdom, a bucket of lego foreskins.
Speaker 2: It's just amazing, the wise men at the manger of
Speaker 2: Jesus presenting their gifts. Of course, we cannot skip the
Speaker 2: Bible's fixation with the penis crossing into the New Testament,
Speaker 2: so we have to include the account in Luke chapter
Speaker 2: two about the circumcision of Jesus. Got a little lego
Speaker 2: knife on the baby. There. We've got the Jesus Last
Speaker 2: Supper Lego. We've got the crucifixion in legos alongside the
Speaker 2: two thieves. Oh, you don't want to be the unsaved
Speaker 2: burning in hell hell fire legos. And of course we've
Speaker 2: got the Holy Trinity, where the Holy Ghost is a
Speaker 2: literal ghost. I mean, it's beautiful. Draw me another number, John.
Speaker 3: Eight two.
Speaker 2: Zero two three five eight two. Do I have someone?
Speaker 2: I have someone here? What's your first name? Brad? Brad.
Speaker 2: We all need to be able to have recreational time
Speaker 2: with our loved ones. Sometimes that includes board games. Many
Speaker 2: of us love board games. You've heard of the classic
Speaker 2: game Monopoly. Now you can play Bibleopoly, the Bible based game.
Speaker 2: We're gonna throw our signatures right here on the top.
Speaker 2: Let's see. Do I want to be over Nazareth, Bethlehem,
Speaker 2: the Angel. I'm just gonna go here on the left.
Speaker 5: I'm asking for it, going to Jerusalem.
Speaker 2: Here, what's the most what's the most the most expensive space?
Speaker 2: Believe it's Jerusalem, It's Joel Ostein's house. It's right here
Speaker 2: on the corn. And the final prize that I have
Speaker 2: for you today, we will draw a number four and
Speaker 2: we'll see how this one goes over. I think I
Speaker 2: may have saved the best, the most for me, the
Speaker 2: most satisfying for last. Go ahead, zero three six, zero three,
Speaker 2: all right, wonderful. What's your first name?
Speaker 3: Sky?
Speaker 2: Sky? Sometimes in perilous moments, a moment of fantasy can
Speaker 2: help us deal. Sometimes those moments can be depicted using toys, figurines,
Speaker 2: action figures. I present to you, ladies and gentlemen, the
Speaker 2: Donald Trump in prison action figures. Oh you want to society? Yeah,
Speaker 2: forgive me my parents and full see this one. You
Speaker 2: want it on the front where you want it?
Speaker 8: That's what.
Speaker 3: Am I gonna mess up? You're showing it to your
Speaker 3: parents if I put Trump on her?
Speaker 2: All right, dad, I got this nice picture at home
Speaker 2: that has Jeffrey Epstein and Trump right next to each other,
Speaker 2: and a flaster just on my dad to see you.
Speaker 2: I'm like, I am surrounded by devout, evangelical Bible banging
Speaker 2: moralists loved Trump. I had. I had lunch with someone
Speaker 2: who was on my extended family and I said this.
Speaker 2: I said, I want you to name one of the
Speaker 2: best teachings of Jesus or in the Bible that's reflected
Speaker 2: in Trump. And she blinked she couldn't. I mean, I said,
Speaker 2: are the meek turn the other cheek? Pride goes before
Speaker 2: the fall, don't love money, don't lust, don't commit adult tree. Right,
Speaker 2: whatever you've done to the least of these, you've done
Speaker 2: it done to me. It's easier for a camel to
Speaker 2: go through the eye of a needle than the rich
Speaker 2: man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Sell all you
Speaker 2: haven't give to the poor and follow me. Blah blah blah.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 2: I mean I just went through verse verse verse again,
Speaker 2: knowing the Bible better than she did, and I was like,
Speaker 2: give me one, give me one christ like attribute in
Speaker 2: this man. And she couldn't. But she didn't change her
Speaker 2: mind on it. He's still awesome.
Speaker 3: Well, because the other way too. If he's like, is
Speaker 3: there anything that Trump said don't do that he hasn't done?
Speaker 5: You know, he goes both ways.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think some of it has to do with
Speaker 2: there's a culture of people that believe that, well, sometimes
Speaker 2: you got to break some eggs to make the omlet.
Speaker 2: We need a strong man who can come and burn
Speaker 2: it down so we can rebuild it in God's image.
Speaker 2: He's I think he speaks to a lot of the
Speaker 2: embedded bigotries that a lot of people they were in
Speaker 2: the shadows, but now they're way comfortable in the light.
Speaker 2: We've learned a lot. Have you guys felt that We've
Speaker 2: learned a lot about our friends and relatives like stuff.
Speaker 2: I was so naive, but I was shocked. He does
Speaker 2: something cruel and horrible and it looks like they kind
Speaker 2: of like it, And I don't know, where have you
Speaker 2: have you cut people out of your life over that?
Speaker 2: Like do you draw that line and say I'm done
Speaker 2: with you?
Speaker 3: I think much in the same way that I got
Speaker 3: my dad to stop talking about religion to me by
Speaker 3: being better at arguing with me, I've scared off all
Speaker 3: of the people who would talk about Trump to me?
Speaker 5: Once again, I do this for a living, and they don't.
Speaker 2: People go on your channel. This is what I hear.
Speaker 2: You're great when you talk religion, but I hate it
Speaker 2: when you talk about politics, And I'm like, these two
Speaker 2: have been in bed with each other for How do
Speaker 2: you extricate politics and religion in this climate?
Speaker 12: Right?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Absolutely, I mean especially when you look at you know,
Speaker 3: where Trump's supports coming from. Right, Like, it would be
Speaker 3: impossible not to address the hypocrisy that you're talking about.
Speaker 3: The least christ Like person to ever run for office
Speaker 3: on a major party ticket is the candidate of Christ here?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Did you see him reference the Islamic Republic of Japan?
Speaker 8: The other.
Speaker 5: It's not the lesser known republics from Japan.
Speaker 2: I mean, I want a big Biden fan, But if
Speaker 2: Biden had pulled at one one thousandth of this shit,
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, I'm saying, Fox News would have
Speaker 2: spontaneously combusted Biden. This blows my mind. Was there anybody
Speaker 2: else who had a contribution, who wanted to speak? I
Speaker 2: see a hand on the back row to my right.
Speaker 3: Is far from Johns can be? Wow, get your ten
Speaker 3: thousand steps today, that's for sure.
Speaker 2: I'm Dan.
Speaker 14: I want to thank you guys for uh everything that
Speaker 14: you do. I've been a supporter for a long time,
Speaker 14: been listener for well over ten years and appreciate everything. Sorry,
Speaker 14: I'm a little nervous, Seth. I sent you an email
Speaker 14: a couple of weeks ago about the guy using a
Speaker 14: guillotine to slice the chocolate vein off of his candy bar.
Speaker 2: I remember, no, no, no, it's it's a guy who
Speaker 2: invented a three D printed Yeah, I think he.
Speaker 14: I think he three D printed it.
Speaker 2: And it slices the veins off of a Snickers bar.
Speaker 14: Because they're too suggestive of a vein on something else.
Speaker 3: Yes, it was. It was too phallic for the Christians
Speaker 3: that really wanted us Snickers but were too homophobic to
Speaker 3: eat one. But well, you know, you got to figure like,
Speaker 3: because I've eaten a lot of Snickers in my life
Speaker 3: and I've never been like, oh it's a cock.
Speaker 14: But my question both of you, you guys are obviously
Speaker 14: rock stars in this community. How do you stay grounded?
Speaker 14: How do you not get full of yourself, let your
Speaker 14: ego get carried away or anything like that.
Speaker 5: Well, I've got Lucinda to keep me in line.
Speaker 2: I was gonna say the same thing. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 2: our partners, my wife's she's her. Oh my bullshit, you
Speaker 2: know she And you know, it's funny in some ways,
Speaker 2: you're getting the edited for broadcast version, right, You're getting
Speaker 2: the you're getting the airbrush. You know, you don't. We're
Speaker 2: just people. Were no more important than anybody else where.
Speaker 2: We don't have We're not wiser necessarily anybody else. And
Speaker 2: it can be intoxicating. I came out of FM radio
Speaker 2: and there's a ton of ego and radio and these
Speaker 2: guys were walking around and they were you know, and
Speaker 2: and it's easy to happen. But I'll tell you, I've
Speaker 2: made it an exercise to remember that nobody, nobody is
Speaker 2: obligated to bring me into their lives, like no one.
Speaker 2: And yet they did, you know, no, they didn't have
Speaker 2: to give me the time of day. They didn't they could.
Speaker 2: They were a squil. There were like five hundred thousand
Speaker 2: active podcasts in the world right now. They don't have
Speaker 2: to listen to me, and yet they did. They don't
Speaker 2: have to call, they don't have to send an email,
Speaker 2: you know, sharing their story. They don't have to come
Speaker 2: out and hug me on the road and introduce me
Speaker 2: to their family. And yet they do, and it's a
Speaker 2: it just blows my mind, and it's it's tramid, sounds
Speaker 2: like a freaking I swear it sounds like a card,
Speaker 2: but it's tremendously humbling when people have opened their lives
Speaker 2: and their hearts to you, and it is for me
Speaker 2: every day. I'm just blown away that I get to
Speaker 2: do what I care about. But I also am connected
Speaker 2: to a family that I'm not getting, a kind of
Speaker 2: family that I haven't gotten in my immediate biological family tree,
Speaker 2: because as I've learned, sometimes your family is the family
Speaker 2: you choose, and your family is the family that chooses you.
Speaker 2: And it has filled up my heart and ways that
Speaker 2: I can't even describe. So if you will, my friends,
Speaker 2: you complete me.
Speaker 3: And I wanted to add to that, you know, I'm sorry,
Speaker 3: Ian Dan, Sorry. So I also wanted to point out,
Speaker 3: you know, Dan, you ask how we keep ourself humble?
Speaker 2: Y'all do that for us?
Speaker 3: Right? So unlike a religious organization or something like that,
Speaker 3: you don't. You don't have the same type of hero
Speaker 3: worship that I think you get in a lot of
Speaker 3: other places. Because we encourage our listeners and our our
Speaker 3: viewers and our followers to call us out when we
Speaker 3: get things wrong. And so when I you know, I
Speaker 3: am strategically incorrect. From time to time, I'll intentionally put
Speaker 3: mistakes into my show to see if anybody notices so clever,
Speaker 3: so clever, yes and so. And when I do that,
Speaker 3: people will very quickly show up to say, you got
Speaker 3: that wrong, you know, and they'll explain to me why
Speaker 3: you know, how it's wrong and why it's wrong. And
Speaker 3: there are a lot of very smart people that listen
Speaker 3: to our shows, and so you know, we we we
Speaker 3: get educated very quickly. So you know, if you're looking
Speaker 3: for humility in this business, just say anything incorrect one
Speaker 3: damn time, and this our audience will provide plenty of it.
Speaker 2: When I post a video or podcast, I don't follow
Speaker 2: comments because it's literally a black hole that you'll never
Speaker 2: get out of for a long term. But for the
Speaker 2: first two days I'm hyper focused because if there's an
Speaker 2: error I need to know about it. They'll find it
Speaker 2: within the first forty eight hours, usually within the first
Speaker 2: twelve here. But there's also jaw dropping pedantry going. So
Speaker 2: I did a piece on flat earthers. Can you believe
Speaker 2: there are people in this world who think the Earth
Speaker 2: is a disk? It just blows my mind. Okay, I
Speaker 2: was saying, these people when so much of the evidence,
Speaker 2: the overwhelming preponderance of evidence, tells us the Earth is round.
Speaker 2: And immediately, yes, immediately I get emails saying it's not round,
Speaker 2: it's a it's an oblet spheral, which.
Speaker 3: By the way, is round. What blows me away is
Speaker 3: how many people will send in a correction without checking
Speaker 3: to see if they were right first. Right, It would
Speaker 3: be like, actually, that's not what that word means. I'm like,
Speaker 3: did you look at a dictionary first before you said this?
Speaker 3: Are you just that full of yourself?
Speaker 2: People in the skeptic community are sharing things that they
Speaker 2: are not vetting that are demonstrably wrong. There was one
Speaker 2: going out recently about Share who had called out Carolyn
Speaker 2: Levitt for something and humiliated her, and yeah, I love Share. Well.
Speaker 2: Share is a legend, right, There's no doubt Share never
Speaker 2: said the thing that they said she shared. There's a
Speaker 2: popular Donald Trump thing that's been going around a quote
Speaker 2: attributed to I think the nineteen nineties where he said,
Speaker 2: you know, if I ever run for politics. I'll run
Speaker 2: as a Republican because the Republicans are the stupidest party. Well,
Speaker 2: it sounds like something he would have said. Trump never
Speaker 2: said it, and yet it speaks to where we're at it.
Speaker 2: We're outraged about him. He's just he's such garbage attitudes
Speaker 2: about the world, and so we lean into those and
Speaker 2: hit clicked like share like share, like share, And sometimes
Speaker 2: when I correct the record and say this never happened,
Speaker 2: will get mad at me. When did When did not
Speaker 2: being correct become the problem?
Speaker 8: Like?
Speaker 2: We need to be creatures of the truth, and and
Speaker 2: we're all emotional bags of animated meat. We're all higher primates,
Speaker 2: we are all susceptible. And it's going to be harder
Speaker 2: and harder in the world of deep fakes and AI
Speaker 2: and what happens when somebody, you know, somebody goes after
Speaker 2: you and they make a piece of media that makes
Speaker 2: you say and do whatever they decided, do you want
Speaker 2: to You'll spend the rest of your life trying to
Speaker 2: debunk it. It's it's a crazy world.
Speaker 5: Yeah, No, I have Eli Bosnik as a co host.
Speaker 5: I think about that all the time.
Speaker 2: Is it true that he went out on one of
Speaker 2: your gam shows wearing a it was it a diaper
Speaker 2: or a thong or all of.
Speaker 3: The gam showshows. Yeah, it's funny. It all started the
Speaker 3: very first time we did a show. Okay, all right,
Speaker 3: you know so the way it's it was he the
Speaker 3: very first time we did a live show. He said, Oh,
Speaker 3: I've got this funny bit. What if I come out
Speaker 3: in my underwear and then You'll be like, do what
Speaker 3: are you doing? And I'll say, oh, you just said
Speaker 3: to address Wow, I normally dress for a record, And
Speaker 3: I'm like, well, I wouldn't ask you to do that,
Speaker 3: but if you're offering that's funny as hell. And so
Speaker 3: I think now he's gotten in his mind that nobody
Speaker 3: really would be happy coming to a live show if
Speaker 3: they didn't see his butt cheeks, and I just don't
Speaker 3: have the heart to tell him that's not the case.
Speaker 2: That's a show you do, you don't do before dinner,
Speaker 2: apparently not a dinner and a show show. Probably not
Speaker 2: here in our final few minutes together, I want you
Speaker 2: guys to be fully aware of a lot of the
Speaker 2: stuff that Noah is a part of. God Awful Movies
Speaker 2: is a remarkable achievement. How many films have you and
Speaker 2: your crew reviewed roughly today?
Speaker 3: I think we're well, yeah, if you include our bonus
Speaker 3: episodes that we do for patrons, I believe we're over
Speaker 3: six hundred now, I.
Speaker 2: Mean twelve hundred hours of Christian media. Of movies. Are
Speaker 2: they pure flicks or are they a guy with a
Speaker 2: cel phone cam and all the everything between.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's as soon as I hate to say it,
Speaker 3: pure flix represents the really the the upper echelon of
Speaker 3: the quality that we deal with on god awful movies.
Speaker 3: But now you know you're talking about the deep face
Speaker 3: of the problems with AIMN. My life has just been
Speaker 3: made all the more miserable. Now that these people have
Speaker 3: access to AI. They can turn these movies out, thirty
Speaker 3: seven of them a day now.
Speaker 2: I love how a lot of the Christian media. When
Speaker 2: I was a Christian, I was the same way, so
Speaker 2: I can say it. I loved I was the part
Speaker 2: of the white male, white heateral male, conservative Republican Christian man,
Speaker 2: and I was playing persecuted all the time. Right, Oh,
Speaker 2: I'm pe persecuted in this country, you know. I like
Speaker 2: the god awful movies, isn't that? Where was it? Sorbo
Speaker 2: who's the teacher and someone goes on trial, God goes
Speaker 2: on trial. What's the name of the what's the movie?
Speaker 3: So I think you might have a couple of them there,
Speaker 3: because there's God's Not Dead. Was the one where he
Speaker 3: was Chorbo played the college professor the.
Speaker 2: Eighties or Yeah, he was the hardened, unhappy, miserable atheist.
Speaker 3: Right who gets hit by a car and decides to
Speaker 3: be Jesus at the very last second. And then there
Speaker 3: was a sequel to it. I believe it was the
Speaker 3: second one where a teacher remind me who played the teacher.
Speaker 3: She was famous in the eighties. Who was it, Melissa
Speaker 3: Joe Hart. Yeah, so she played the teacher that got
Speaker 3: sued for saying Jesus during a lesson at a public school.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 3: Sobody said, well, is there any historical example of somebody
Speaker 3: who's you know whatever it was, And she says, well,
Speaker 3: Jesus Christ of Nazareth, And so they said the a
Speaker 3: c lu came out to sewer and then I believe
Speaker 3: that was the second one in that series. I thought
Speaker 3: that they missed an opportunity of having the rapture happen
Speaker 3: while she was on the stand in the middle of
Speaker 3: that one, but maybe part six.
Speaker 2: We've done that. I was able to guess on god
Speaker 2: awful movies, and we did when Footman Tire What Will
Speaker 2: Horses Do, which is an estes Perkle film that came
Speaker 2: out I want to say the seventies, sixties or some
Speaker 2: I think early.
Speaker 5: Seventies, and it is torture porn.
Speaker 2: Its absolute moreture porn. And I'm telling you there's a
Speaker 2: fetish aspect to a lot of the ways that religious
Speaker 2: organizations portray evil and I kind of wonder if they're
Speaker 2: getting off like they're like, well, if you don't accept Jesus,
Speaker 2: this is going to happen, and then they take tremendous
Speaker 2: pleasure in showing you all these lascivious deeds and carnality
Speaker 2: and violence, and it kind of feels like pornographic that
Speaker 2: in that sense, y do you feel like, maybe, hey,
Speaker 2: now we've got an excuse to eat the forbidden fruit
Speaker 2: right right right?
Speaker 3: And it's interesting if you look into the like the
Speaker 3: history of cinema in America. For a very long time,
Speaker 3: we were very prudish about what we would and wouldn't
Speaker 3: allow on the movie screen. And one of the early
Speaker 3: ways they would get around that was by using Bible stories. Right,
Speaker 3: so if you are telling a Bible story, well, we
Speaker 3: know the Bible well enough to know there's plenty of
Speaker 3: tits and ass in the Bible, so the you know,
Speaker 3: but it was really hard for the censors to say, well,
Speaker 3: this is offensive when you can be like it's chapter
Speaker 3: in urse Man. So and I think there's probably that's
Speaker 3: at least part of the reason. If you look at
Speaker 3: the history of like art through the Renaissance and everything,
Speaker 3: you know, they used the Biblical stories as an excuse
Speaker 3: to paint a lot of really lascivious things that might
Speaker 3: be considered pornographic, you know, if it wasn't tied to
Speaker 3: the Bible. So I think it's probably just part of
Speaker 3: that lineage, you know, like in if Footman Tire you
Speaker 3: the guy the director that made that, He made his
Speaker 3: name by doing slasher fix afflicks of the seventies and
Speaker 3: then found Jesus and moved on to that.
Speaker 2: One of my favorites. They showed them Christian School was
Speaker 2: super Christian. I shit you not. He turned into a
Speaker 2: superhero with a costume and a cape and flew around
Speaker 2: doing Jesus shit. It was the wackiest whackiest. Then there
Speaker 2: was the Thief in the Night series. They brought us
Speaker 2: in and showed us essentially the end of the World films.
Speaker 2: Now I'm in like sixth grade and they show us
Speaker 2: and say this will happen. Millions of people disappear at
Speaker 2: the rapture, the One World government takes everything over. They
Speaker 2: make you take the mark of the beast, you get
Speaker 2: it tattooed. If you refuse, they take you to the
Speaker 2: middle of a town square and they execute you by guillotine.
Speaker 2: And they had bloody guillotines and heads carried out in baskets.
Speaker 2: And they showed us these films, and at the end
Speaker 2: they had an altar call and say, now, who would
Speaker 2: like to accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and
Speaker 2: save it? And we were weeping, we were terrified. We
Speaker 2: rushed to the stage. It's a kind of child abuse.
Speaker 2: I don't know. Is that an overreach to say child abuse?
Speaker 3: I wouldn't think so at all. Like I've seen some
Speaker 3: of those movies, it's absolutely abusive. If you took the
Speaker 3: religious element out of it, everyone would agree that those
Speaker 3: movies are so.
Speaker 2: I think, you know, the passion is and there's a
Speaker 2: sequel coming out. Did you guys do the Path? Did
Speaker 2: you review?
Speaker 3: Oh? Yeah, we did that one live in New York City.
Speaker 3: I think that might have been our first live show.
Speaker 2: And it's funny because the church really got kind of
Speaker 2: nervous about Mel Gibson when he started screaming all the
Speaker 2: Holocaust denial and the anti Semitic stuff and Jews are
Speaker 2: responsible for all the wars in the world, and he's
Speaker 2: beaten his girlfriend and he's a total drunk and all
Speaker 2: these other things. They were parading him around the church
Speaker 2: circuit and it was at the time Passion was the
Speaker 2: number one most profitable rated R movie in his story,
Speaker 2: and now he's going back to the well somebody else
Speaker 2: is playing Jesus, So you're going to review it, I'm
Speaker 2: guessing Oh absolutely.
Speaker 3: Yeah. That record, by the way, is now held by Deadpool,
Speaker 3: So so Jesus Deadpool.
Speaker 5: I really like that.
Speaker 2: Have you guys had a good time today? That's really
Speaker 2: our dream. You know, I know your time is precious,
Speaker 2: and I know that you have responsibilities in your life,
Speaker 2: and you know it's for you to be here. Is
Speaker 2: it's a real gift to us. Everyone's thanking us for
Speaker 2: being here, But I don't know about you, no, but
Speaker 2: I look out and I'm just like thank you, like,
Speaker 2: thank you for coming. No, do you have any final
Speaker 2: thoughts before we put a bow on it today?
Speaker 3: Now that you put me on the spot, like no,
Speaker 3: I just want to reiterate I really appreciate you guys
Speaker 3: coming out. You know, we do this week after week
Speaker 3: to an empty room, and it is really nice to
Speaker 3: sometimes be reminded.
Speaker 5: That you know, there are ears on the other end
Speaker 5: of it. So thank you so much for coming out.
Speaker 6: I think.
Speaker 2: My I think the one thing i'd leave you with
Speaker 2: and we're going to hang out will be out if
Speaker 2: you guys want, we'll be with you for a little
Speaker 2: bit of time if you want to, we'd love a
Speaker 2: chance to meet you. By the way, everybody you want
Speaker 2: to guess I don't have a photographer, so if anybody
Speaker 2: has a cell phone, anybody want to take a quick
Speaker 2: picture of just like the room or anything real fast
Speaker 2: to have? Uh oh go ahead, noah, yeah, you guys,
Speaker 2: all right.
Speaker 3: All right?
Speaker 2: Can we get everybody in there?
Speaker 3: I think so everybody say cheese.
Speaker 2: I thought you're gonna say, Jesus, here's a fun one.
Speaker 2: When you see somebody out there, especially with Christians, say hey,
Speaker 2: just walk up with the dead pan, straight face and say,
Speaker 2: did you know if you say Jesus backwards it sounds
Speaker 2: like sausage. Even before they get offended, they will be
Speaker 2: doing it in their brain for the rest of their life.
Speaker 2: I think if there was any final thing, it would
Speaker 2: be this. And it goes back to my story earlier.
Speaker 2: It's that we're around by people that are expecting us
Speaker 2: to validate them. But that's not why we're here. It's
Speaker 2: it's not our responsibility to validate other people to keep
Speaker 2: them comfortable. Certainly, we want to build bridges where we can.
Speaker 2: But I'm telling you, you know, would my life in
Speaker 2: some ways be easier if I played nice and you know,
Speaker 2: played Christian? I don't know, probably in some ways. But
Speaker 2: I would never go back. Do anybody else feel that,
Speaker 2: Like I'd never go back. I would never retreat back
Speaker 2: into the matrix because even despite the challenges, I'm happier now.
Speaker 2: I'm less scared of death now than I am when
Speaker 2: I believed in heaven. Is that freaky? Like I don't
Speaker 2: fear death, Like the moments mean more because I know
Speaker 2: that they are finite. My relationships mean more because I
Speaker 2: realized that, you know, the conditional ones fell away, and
Speaker 2: the people who loved and respected me for who I was,
Speaker 2: they were the ones who stuck around. Those are the
Speaker 2: important ones. I've my circle has become bigger and smaller
Speaker 2: in some ways. And I'll tell you, an authentic life
Speaker 2: is a gift that you give to yourself every day.
Speaker 2: It just it returns to you every day. And that's
Speaker 2: my hope for you when you leave and you get
Speaker 2: back out into this crazy world, and it is crazy
Speaker 2: if you are able to be who you are and
Speaker 2: be honest about it and know that we're all just
Speaker 2: primates trying to figure it out and doing the best
Speaker 2: we can, and that we're good without gods. We're good
Speaker 2: for goodness sake, and we are us and not who
Speaker 2: other people expect us to be. That is a gift.
Speaker 2: It is a Christmas gift three sixty five twenty four
Speaker 2: to seven, and I hope you give that gift to yourself.
Speaker 2: What an honor it has been to be here today.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for coming out and being a
Speaker 2: part of it. A real, real crisis.
Speaker 11: Thank you.
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