Full Transcript for The Cornell Seven Frat Scandal, Three Arguments for God & Investing Advice for Gen Z

the rug. I don't really know if there's much of a point in trying to litigate the details of this case, like Obviously if what the girl is alleging is true and there is an appropriate level of evidence to substantiate what she is saying, then I think this should go much further than the expulsion of a couple of students. I think anybody who participates in the gang rape of a woman is sick and demented and evil and should be castrated and killed in the streets. And I don't know. There's just really nothing else to say, you know, besides that. So I guess, you know, the more speaker-1: The university expelled two students, expended the rest of them. Like what was the university supposed to do and on top of that? Like they the university can't execute people. speaker-0: Yeah, they expelled you. No, no, the university can execute people but they could it they could report it to the authorities opposed to just conducting an internal investigation. speaker-1: Well the police are investigating it. Like there w there is an investigation happening. speaker-0: Now there is, but originally when this happened a couple of years ago, it was just an internal investigation by Cornell which led to the expulsion of two children. But there was never any like there was never actu an official police investigation by like a special victims unit or or s or a a sex crimes team. speaker-1: Well that wouldn't the university's duty though, right? The university investigates like they have their com completely separate systems. They have Title Nine, they probably like speaker-0: But you don't think that in a in a case of criminal activity they they should involve they should probably have reported this to the cops and the fact that they didn't involve the cops is probably because they didn't want this getting out of hand with media and all things like that? They speaker-1: Did it report to the police? When did it go to the police? speaker-0: It went to the it went to the police not when it w I don't believe it went to the police when it when it originally speaker-1: I thought it was like a month later. I could be totally misremembering the case details. speaker-0: No, me too. I mean, to be honest, I'm not understand my understanding from when I was reading the articles was that this originally happened in October of twenty twenty four and the kids got expel expelled. The Cornell kinda kept it in house with its own in house ⁓ investigation. And then speaker-1: So the the fraternity gang rape occurred on October nineteenth, twenty twenty four and it was reported to the to Cornell University Police, so to the actual police on November eighth, twenty twenty four. speaker-0: Mm-hmm. Right. But it never it ⁓ it never made it to like an actual, like like I said, like a special victims unit or or something where this would actually be thoroughly investigated by of somebody who has experience investigating sex crimes. Like all I'm saying when I say that I think that this was swept under the rug by the university is whenever I hear the words internal investigation, to me that is ⁓ you know, a bunch of elites in the university in their ivory towers doing their best to not make this story reach national headlines. That's it that's just like a code word for what that means to me. Maybe that isn't the case in in in this particular example. I don't know. I don't have like the details off the top of my head like that, but internal investigation, I'm very skeptical of those words. speaker-1: ⁓ yeah, I mean I honestly I I think that the y the university system is very bizarre where they like to do things internal to themselves and they act kind of as though the police are. Like the like the the weird idea that the that the university is the proper usage for this is is is kind of creepy and kind of weird. Kind of cases should be handled by the police and if what she says is true is true, these people should just be killed. And so I'm like speaker-0: Of course, that's exactly what I'm saying. I'm a convention. Yeah, n now it's like a civil suit and and ⁓ you know it's it's reached, you know, ⁓ a it's gotten a lot of media attention now, which I think is exactly what the university didn't want. It's just like it just started to get this media attention. ⁓ so we'll see how it ends up going. Now I think it'll actually be investigated by like, you know, in a more legitimate way. ⁓ so you know, I guess we'll see. Obviously, you know, you and I both agree. If what the girl is saying is true, then these people shouldn't just be expelled. Like there should be criminal charges involved and they should, you know, go get ass raped and a in a state. Prison somewhere. ⁓ speaker-1: Just killed. Like just shoot them in the forehead. Like you need to not live. speaker-0: Like, bit Yeah, un unfortunately we don't do things like that in America, so the yeah the speaker-1: We used to by the way, we used to kill rapists. Yeah. And then in nineteen seventy-six or nineteen something in seventies, the very liberal Supreme Court decided that it was unconstitutional to kill people who rape adult women. And then in two thousand seven, roughly in that range, somewhere around there, they decided that it was unconstitutional to kill rapists of children too. Like when you talk about how important it is to get a good Supreme Court, we literally aren't allowed to kill people who rape children anymore. Because and it's not that they ruled that like the death penalty broadly is unconstitutional or something. They ruled Ruled that the death penalty is unconstitutional specifically for the rape of children, because that would be like unconnected, it would be considered like kind of unusual, or it would be a dis a disproportionate use of force against it. It's like, I'm sorry, no, actually. If you rape children, it's not disproportionate, we'll say you should die. And so you talk about like what do we need to do? I mean, it's the average rapist gets just under 10 years

in prison now and spends just over five. Like we have a very weird soft on crime situation and you know like red states tend to do a little better about this, but it's it's very bizarre. We don't punish rapists enough. And one of the weird things too that happens is rapists are actually really hard to punish, 'cause it's really difficult to prove a rape. Where like he says like she consented and she says no I didn't. Whereas it's like like if I like attacked Michael and started like beating the shit out of him and then he's got like a black eye and like a broken rib. I'm not gonna like afterward, like Michael consented for me to break his rib. Like, no. No, like he definitely didn't. Whereas the problem is that like if you have sex with somebody. It actually is a little bit difficult to prove whether there was consent involved or not. But and so you you have to make the punishment so unbelievably brutal. in order to deter the action. Like you don't just get expelled, you should die. But on the flip side, you get the the the opposite end where there's there are a lot of fake allegations. And the problem with fake allegations is it makes real allegations, it makes women who are actually victims less likely to believe and it destroys the lives of innocent men. And people all the time they say those are super rare, you know it's only two percent, it's only five percent it's less than ten percent and they throw out a bunch of these stats. The problem is that stat's not right. Like it's just not right. What that stat comes from is it comes from a meta analysis that found that around five percent, sort of three to I think it was three to eight percent on their confidence interval of allegations to the police were ruled conclusively false by the police at an early stage. So that's not social allegations, just kind of like amongst like a friend group or whatever, or you know, like, ⁓ I hate that guy because he did this to me. And it's not allegations that like of the set of all of them that actually were false, and it doesn't include ones that we had inconclusive evidence or whatever. It is the set of allegations that made it all the way to the police that were then conclusively ruled false at an early stage. And so the problem is we have a very weird scenario where people do lie. And everyone who's been through high school knows that sometimes mean girls make up rumors. The studies are very clear that men and women are similarly aggressive when you account for reputational destruction through rumor as a form of aggression. You know, sociopathic men are more likely to just hit you in the face. Sociopathic women are gonna start a lie about you. And if you've been through high school, you've had a lie started about you. And then, you know, we all know the classic Karen example where You know, like we see these videos of where she's like, the dog attacked me, and it's on video that the dog didn't attack her. Like she's just lying. She's making something up,

and we know that Karen's make stuff up. And so we know that mean girls in high school make stuff up. We know that Karen's make stuff up, but for some reason we like to insist that 21-year-olds, you know, in college in between never ever make stuff up. And that's, you know, it's it's misogynistic to women to claim that they're somehow impervious to lying. Of course they can lie. Now you look at this case, it doesn't look like she's lying. The details of you can see the screenshot of the Snapchat text. Yeah. It seems pretty damn clear that this happened. And it seems pretty damn clear that the university, you know, shut down the frat. They were like, no, you were not allowed to have this fraternity at all anymore. The university expelled the students, and the university reported to the university police, and now there's an ongoing Ithaca investigation. And so could they have handled it better? Absolutely. speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, speaker-1: And the specific details of whether they handled it unacceptably or not are gonna get litigated. But I don't think it's immediately obvious from the case so far that what Cornell did was evil. I hope that the police execute those men if they did it. And the the problem very well may be with the police themselves not pushing hard enough. Certainly the problem is with the Supreme Court who said they're not allowed to be executed. Like if they get convicted, they'll probably get a couple of years in prison. And that's not vaguely appropriate. Our legal systems need to kill these people. But I I I I don't see from the evidence so far, and if you have an evidence I'm missing, if in the comments, if I'm wrong, you know, I'll issue a I'm wrong statement. But I don't see in the evidence so far that what the university did was unbelievably unacceptable. speaker-0: No, I would yeah, I I I don't think I've se I I saw that. I think that the university did what most universities would do, which is they try to do damage control and keep it in house. I mean, that I think that's that's likely what happens. It's just odd that it would even be investigated by the Cornell police instead of a ri it's not like it's not like a a minor little crime where you'd be like, ⁓ yeah, the the Cornell police can handle this one. This is a major crime. This is a huge crime. This should probably like there's a whole there's a whole unit that is dedicated to investing to investigating crimes like this for all the reasons that you explain, which is it is extrem Extremely difficult to prove sex crimes. It's very hard. That's why outcry witnesses are super important. That's why character witnesses are super important. Which is like an outcry witness is not that important, or it's really not important at all in a homicide. It just doesn't matter. Like the person who you told first about what happened to you when somebody's dead is pretty irrelevant. But like an outcry witness in a rape case, that's like your star witness. It's like, ⁓ my god, like right after she was raped, she texted her mom that something terrible happened to her, you know, six minutes after the assault. That's like tremendous evidence, whereas that would be super weak evidence and a homicide or something like that. So there's a very difficult, very nuanced case when it comes speaker-1: Character evidence is not very good though. Like it's a good boy, he would rape anybody. Like I'm sorry. Like his his friends and his mother and his professors don't think he'd rape. Come on. She's a good girl. She would never lie about someone like this. Like come on. Like like I I I think character witnesses are actually like really, really bad in basically all cases. speaker-0: No I I I meant But this is the problem is that they are bad. You know, e outcry witnesses are also not great. But because rape cases tend to have so little evidence and they're so hard to prosecute, you end up relying on kind of shitty evidence like that. So all I'm saying is that, like, yes, I agree with you that we need to have incredibly intense punishments for rapists, because we have to make it we have to make people really scared to do it, because if and when it does happen, it's really hard to prove. So the best way to make it not happen is to just to to have public executions. So people are like, I'm not even gonna roll the dice because if I do get caught, I'm actually just gonna get, you know, stoned to death in the middle of my fucking town square. So I do think that that is a viable solution. speaker-1: And let her cast the first stone. speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And then I think the other viable solution is like it has to be investigated through the proper channel. So again, like I don't know, I'm not gonna like, you know, condemn Cornell. I really don't know. But I just think that it as a general rule, these things should not be handled in house. These things should go to, you know, the proper investigative bodies. I would have speaker-1: I three reforms to increase the sit to fix the situation. One, all rapists gotta die. And which ⁓ we like we may need a constitutional amendment or we need a new Supreme Court ruling or whatever, because it's currently officially considered unconstitutional, which is insane. But one, all rapists gotta die. Two all rapists Assault and rape charges at universities need to be handled by the police. It's very perverse that our system. And you know, we had the the Title IX, ⁓ we have the dear colleague letter from Barack Obama. We have all this Title IX legislation. Most universities, maybe even be all universities, have their own separate Title IX kangaroo courts that exist within themselves. It's a very perverse system. And I I don't think it's obvious that Cornell broke from what tends to happen. I just don't think this should be what happened. speaker-0: I agree, yes, that exactly. speaker-1: Should stop handling this stuff and police should handle it. But here's my third rule. And this one is possibly gonna

get me in trouble. Because you know, ⁓ but I think that if you can prove conclusively that a woman lied about a rape, she needs to be severely punished, like with prison time for that. And that's not to say if we can't conclusively prove either way, that either the man has to die or she has to die or whatever. No, no. I am not saying that. I'm talking about the kind of cases where you can prove it didn't happen. You happen to have a video where like she's saying yes, please, like in the middle of it. Or you happen to like she says he raped me and it turns out he was in Kansas or something. Like the kinds of cases where you can prove immediately, definitively, that it didn't happen. Because that would de incentivize the fake allegations. And if you remove the obviously fake allegations, then we can start to not believe all women, because that's misogynistic to claim that women are impervious to lying. Like it removes their agency to say that they can't lie. But to believe most women. We should enter a space where you can default to always believing. That would be a really good space to be. And we move in that direction when we severely punish sociopathic bad actors. speaker-0: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, I would be totally fine with that. I think that the believe all women argument is just so fucking stupid. It would be like, you know, like I mean, obviously, you know, the data that you cited is correct, which is that the five percent number is the absolute bare minimum of false allegations. This number's probably higher than that. But even if it's true that the majority or even vast majority of allegations are true, that's still not good enough reason to believe them. That would be like, you know, if if you every time you investigate a a kidnapping case or a murder case, you say, well, the first t the the the first suspect the police have has usually is the person to have actually done the crime or did the crime. It's like, okay, that's not good enough reason to just throw that person in jail, just like without further investigation. Like it's such a bizarre argument to me that's made. It's like it's like, okay, like like w what's even the point? Like you are innocent until proven guilty. Just e even if even if fake al allegations are less than one percent, it's it doesn't even matter. It just doesn't matter. It's like it you you have to prove it. speaker-1: We need to the word believe. I think the believe the word believe is semantically overloaded. Like if I was like hanging out with my good friend, ⁓ and she says like that guy over there like you know, assaulted me or whatever, mm-hmm, I'm not gonna be like, Well prove it to me. Like And even if it's not my good friend, like if I'm like, you know, at a party or whatever and I'm you know, I meet some guy and you know we're just like you know, like we start becoming friends and you we're like singing the Katy Perry lyrics together and we're like having a good time and someone comes up to me and they're like, By the way, that guy's a rapist. I'm gonna speaker-0: Right. speaker-1: ⁓ shit, like I kind of like don't want to be around him anymore. And I'm not gonna be like, show me the screenshots. Like, I actually am going to believe all accusers in this kind of short-term social allegation. But then I think that guy should die if true. And my barrier of believing if true is very different for like because I think you have a right not to be murdered. And so if the government is going to murder you. We need to go through a due process to ensure you didn't do it. You don't have a right to be my friend or to say Katy Perry lyrics with me. And so, like, if I think there's a reasonably good chance you're a rapist, I'm actually not saying this is part of me with you anymore. Like that's not happening. speaker-0: What made you choose Katy Perry? Have you been singing ⁓ little fireworks lately? speaker-1: ⁓ yeah, well Katy Perry's the goat. Like I know that you're like a little bit homosexual, but my like gay tendency is like like there's there's the best th the best moments in life are when you're with your boys bumping like a hard style remix of a Katy Perry song and you just got the like music going and you're like like like my my karaoke song is part of me by kara by part of me by karaoke. Part of me by Katy Perry. Like I think she's like so much fun. speaker-0: See that everybody? I mean I don't know how you can ever make the argument that you are a misogynist when your karaoke song is ⁓ Katy Perry. speaker-1: Yeah, right. Clearly I love women and I love Justin Trudeau as a result. speaker-0: Wow, that's how much you like Katie Perry that you've even taken Justin Trudeau's side. Yeah. Yeah. speaker-1: ⁓ no, I swear, I swear. Katy Perry's politics are not good. Katy Perry's music is, and those are like distinct. speaker-0: I I think it's a great distinction that you made. It's like it's like Clavicular, for example. Like he just got accused of ⁓ of statutory rape. It's like if you said that to I'm like, okay, like that's not that hard for me to believe. Like, I could believe that. But I don't think that he should go to jail for it. I don't think that this entire li like I ⁓ no, I you would need a higher burden of proof for me to believe that. But if you were like someone's just like, Yeah, like it looks like clavicular was ⁓ accused of statutory rape, I'd be like, Okay, like that's probably true. Like I probably like, you know, I'm not gonna like spend a lot of time like defending him, like speaker-1: You know I actually default the other way when it comes to prominent right wing people. I think the Trump Egene Carroll story was silly. The Brett Kavanaugh one, that's the like truly like that like that was really bad. That was really The problem is that you have an incredible incentive structure to ⁓ accuse people of things. You look at some of the Andrew Tate cases, some of them look like he probably did it, and some of them look like he

probably didn't do it. speaker-0: That was a real shame. Those are pretty bad. speaker-1: like dichotomy there but ⁓ but like you look at like something like that the problem is the incentive for so like you know when he's making out with seventy girls every single night on camera which by the way Probably don't do that. Like it's probably just like a bad life strategy to do that. Yeah. ⁓ but, you know, if you're you know, have a body count of ninety seven thousand and you're, you know, famous for being a little bit like aggressive. I saw a clip one time where he told a woman that he roofied her and she says, ⁓ that's kinda hot. And then he's like like and I don't know if he was kidding or not, but he just like straight up said that to her. And then she was turned on by the situation. And so like when you're that guy, like The the the problem is that there there's so many kind of like the odds of fine if almost all women are normal and almost all women don't lie, when you have two thousand women who could lie about you, you only need zero point five percent to be crazy enough to lie. And so I don't know the details of this. If he raped her, kill him. I hadn't looked at it at all. speaker-0: No. But I I just saw the New York Times headline and I was like, okay, like I've seen some clips of him. Like same thing with Andrew Tate, right? Like I haven't done my own investigative research, but like the accusations against Andrew Tate seem like, you know, pretty like it it seems like it's it's likely that he's probably a a pimp and a speaker-1: Definitely a pimp. He and like pimp should go to prison. Like he ran an OnlyFans like pimp model. The problem is that that's not illegal to speaker-0: Right, right. But that's not the ⁓ yeah, yeah. There there are harsher allegations around sex trafficking and like holding sex slaves and all weird shit like that. speaker-1: Yeah. I saw a video of him like literally beating a woman and you know telling her, like, say you love me. She's like, I love you. And he's like, I don't believe you. He's like hitting her with like a I don't know, was it a whip or a belt or something? You know, the the video is kind of blurred out to like, you know, share, you know, hide her pers her her likeness and everything. But he's just like smacking her. But then the weird thing is, th like there are women who are into really rough sex. And so you find a video of a guy hitting her. And it's like my first thought is kill him. Like, what the fuck? But then you you know, you hear some of these responses and it's like, I I I have good friends of mine, like female friends, who are really into like, you know, getting hit with belts and stuff. Yeah, it it happens sometimes. Like that was the defense that Diddy tried to have with the the case the Cassie case where You know, and he ended up getting like a year and a half or two years in prison for like bringing prostitutes across state borders or something. And there's video of him like beating

up Cassie. And then there are texts from her like three days later being like, I love you so much. You know, and and like the and like begging to hang out with him again. And the in the problem in he got accused of raping his his assistant, but then his assistant like asked to go work for him again or something afterward. And it gets this very weird scenario where you get all these like emotion. emotional feelings tied up to it. And almost certainly Diddy is doing evil stuff. Like like you look at this and you see him just like like destroy like dragging her back into a hotel room. Like on the hotel camera. And you're like, that guy probably should go to prison for life. He probably should kill that guy. speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: But then you see the text and it g it gets very confusing. Like the problem is relationships between men and women are very, very confusing. And what's toxic and what's evil and what's fun. This gets to the problem of like just because it was consensual doesn't make it right. speaker-0: Yeah. I I just got a text from my girlfriend that said you should talk about the seven boys who drugged and gang raped a girl on your podcast at Cornell. Well, we're literally talking about it right now, and she says, Good. I hope that our com I hope that she approves of the conversation that we've had about it. Because speaker-1: I think it should approve everything you've said and probably like eighty percent of what I've said. speaker-0: I'll I would be interested. I w I wish we could bring her on right now. I would be so interested to hear her perspective about what you said around the false allegations, because it really does do a tremendous disservice to women and to actual victims of sexual assault when people make these false allegations, particularly around prominent people. Because prominent people do have a propensity to rape and sexually assault people because they're super powerful, they think that they're above the law, they think they're untouchable. And there has been this culture, especially pre Me Too, where people in positions of power have leveraged that power to sexually assault and abuse women. So I do speaker-1: Harvey Weinstein, the comedian guy who with the rookies, what's his name? speaker-0: It happens all the time. So it's like I do, Cosby. Yeah, it's like this happens all the time and I do want those people to be accused. But the problem is that when you have so many false allegations against people in positions of power, then somebody like you understandably says, I'm going to default to not believing you because all your sisters behind you fucked you in your ass by making up allegations for money or for extortion or for power or for political motivations or whatever it is. So speaker-1: Cosby. Cosby speaker-0: I think that that would actually solve a lot of these problems by punishing those people with prison time. The second thing, just on the topic of Andrew Tate, ⁓ and also because I know that, you know, we we have spent a lot of time on the podcast talking about how gender feminism has is a lie that has been sold to women, you know, telling them that children are not necessary to fulfillment, marriage is not necessary for fulfillment. ⁓ but you know, the other thing is that there is a male dimension to this. And we have this really sort of weird situation right now where somebody like Clevicular or somebody like Andrew Tate, both of whom have now been accused of sexual assault, are like prominent role models for men. And that to me is a shame. Like you cannot have marriages without marriageable men. You cannot have healthy families if enormous numbers of young men are incapable of maintaining relationships, incapable of assuming responsibility if they're economically adrift, if they're socially isolated, and if their primary role model Are you know sex traffickers and rapists? And I think that it's unfortunate because I think that that is in large part, and I've talked about this, you know, on like you know, the debate with Mark Manson and with Michael Sartan and stuff, this idea that like some of these fringe elements of the manosphere are a backlash against feminism. And it's like, I do think that's true. I think that there's a vacuum of like positive male romance. I think that men withdraw in part because they have been told over and over again that they represent everything that is wrong with the world. And that's not helpful. And when you say things like that, you create a vacuum that gets filled by these sort of like really alt-crazy figures like an Andrew Tate who who you know perpetuate equally evil and unhelpful messages. So like I want I I I I I understand. That, you know, people like to celebrate this idea that we should all just be maximally liberated from obligations. But that's a really dumb idea. We need obligations, we need guardrails, men need socialization, they need responsibility, they need obligations to other people. And so part of what I want to do in this podcast is not just criticize gender feminism, but I also want to look at it from the other perspective, which is that we need to flesh out a meaningful vision for what masculinity can be. ⁓ so Do you have any thoughts on, you know, what positive male role models might look like and might sound like? You know, what do you speaker-1: I have the best right here. But a read scripture to you. speaker-0: Okay, go go for it. Go for it. What do men need to do in order to make themselves interesting and viable partners for women according to the Bible? Take it away. speaker-1: ⁓ shoot, wait, I'm in Romans. I'm I wanna be in 1 Corinthians, not in Romans. ⁓ all right, here we go. First First Corinthians eleven one. This is a letter, this is Paul's letter to the Corinthians. Be imitations of me, just as I also just as I also am of Christ. And ⁓ so there's a single line, first Corinthians eleven one. I think the the ideal male role model is Jesus Christ. And I think that, you

know, you look at something like Clavicular, and these are deeply not Christian ideas. You look at something like Andrew Tate, these are deeply non-Christian ideas. And if we lived in a world that was still dominated by the Christian West, this kind of thing would never happen. You would never get the feminism destruction where the the the female hero of Mary, who what's her title? The Virgin Mary. Like And so if that's if the female hero is the sinless mother who raises her family as best as she possibly can, if that's your female hero, and your male hero is Jesus Christ, who bears his cross, who takes on as much responsibility as he possibly can, who bears the sins of his community, in his case, the entire world, and is responsible for everything. We need women to Want to be good, sound mothers. When you look at polling data, and women say that it's more important that they have a high powered career than that they have a family, that's not vaguely appropriate. And when you look at men who are on the two ends of it, where we've lost this kind of middle class of men, where you have the incel loser man who says, No one will ever look at me, and therefore I she w she won't give me anything, so I won't give her anything. It's like no, pick up your cross and bear it anyway. And then you have the kind of man like Andrew Tater Clavicular who says, I don't owe anything to any women because I have infinite of them. It's like, no, pick up your cross and bear it anyway. As Paul says in First Corinthians, imitate me as I imitate Christ. Your male role models are in the Bible. And your male role models are not clavicular. That doesn't mean clavicular is wrong about everything. It doesn't mean Andrew Tate is wrong about everything. And I don't mean to throw the baby out with the bathwater. When Andrew Tate says shut up, go to the gym. When Andrew Tate says work harder and make more money. When Andrew Tate says feminism has given you a raw deal and it's fucked up your life. And he says that you are a victim, but don't have a victim mentality. He says that you have been given a raw deal and unacceptable things have happened to you. And yet, dominate and be a man anyway. That's a correct message. And then he goes and is a internet pimp and like Like don't imitate that. Clavicular has a correct message. You just saying something honest that is that when you look better, your life is better. When you go to the gym, when you take care of yourself, when you get a good haircut, when you dress better, when you take care of yourself and take care of your look, your life improves. And then he goes like crazy style, and it's like the There are good messages in these people. And these good messages are good insofar as they are Christ-like, insofar as they are biblical, and they're bad insofar as there is a crazy diversion from it. And so you can get good, important, true things from these people without making them your role model, or you can skip to the truth and read the good book. speaker-0: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Look, I think freedom from obligation very quickly becomes freedom from meaning. And men seem particularly vulnerable to that. So I think, you know, instead of constantly asking, How can we convince women to have more children? That's part of it. But another important question is how do we produce more men whom women actually want to marry and have children with? Men who are competent. Well, I think ⁓ what do you mean we can't? Of course we can. speaker-1: No, no, you will always have a situation where only around thirty percent of men are at that threshold because the problem is that it's a ranking system. The hierarchy is not objective, hierarchy is subjective. Hierarchy, your placement in the hierarchy is relative to other people in the hierarchy. And we know historically that only 30 to 40% of men who reached reproductive age had children. And in the era before condoms and birth control, having children means having sex. Whereas 80 to 90% of women who reached reproductive age had children in sort of an anthropological sense. And so we know that when women select Women are our hypergamous, they s they select up and across on mating hierarchies, and the men rank themselves into hierarchy and women peel off from the top. And we know that they only peel off thirty to forty percent of men. And we know also that you have twice as many female ancestors as you do male. You say, how could that possibly be the case? I have one man, one woman has a kid. Think of people used to marry their second, third, fourth cousins, and so then they would have repeat ancestors, but you'd have more male repeats than you would female repeats. ⁓ Imagine if all the women have one kid and half the men have two and half the men have zero. This is that two to one standard. We also know that pre-Christian societies, whether it's the ancient Israelites in the Bible, they did polygamy, Jacob, Abraham, David, Solomon. We know that the Greeks, the top people, all had these concubines, they all had their mistresses. We know that the Arabs have their harems, they still do. We know the ancient Chinese, like this idea of monogamy, of having the men all pair up, that's where you get the boomer idea of I hate my wife, because your wife respond. Respect you because you weren't marriageable. But we had a marriage system anyway, where we insisted on socially and sometimes even legally enforced monogamy, and the people paired up anyway. But when you're left to your natural devices, you don't get one-to-one monogamy. You actually get polygamy. And when you look at polling data, two-thirds of Gen Z women report being in relationships, and one-third of Gen Z men do. You let go, uh-oh. That's that two to one ratio. Like the problem is you actually cannot make eighty percent of men be a top thirty percent of men. Like by definition, only thirty percent of men can be a top thirty percent of men. And the women are looking to compare. They're not

looking for absolutes. speaker-0: I think that ⁓ you know what what I'm trying to say is that a lot of time when you talk to women and you ought and you ask them, you know, do you want to have kids? A lot of time the answer with millennial and Gen Z women is most often yes, I will I would, but I don't necessarily need to. If I don't, that's fine. But if I find the right partner, I will. And speaker-1: Then I'll have one or two kids and send my kid to daycare and still walk my girl boss, you know, pantsuit. speaker-0: Yeah, but just put put putting all that aside for a second, the the the speaker-1: But that aside, that's like a really important part of the decline of the American speaker-0: Yes, that is an important part, but it's also important that we have men who are worthy of being husbands, that are worthy of reproducing with. And what I'm saying is that I think that there's a massive crisis of masculinity browing brewing. And I think that less and less men are becoming viable, interesting, economically dop dominant partners that are worthy of having kids with. Like you know, I think that there needs to be a a a ⁓ redefining of what masculinity is and we we should spend more time or or equal time, but as a man I like to spend more time with men than with women. I want to talk to men and help them become partners that are deserving of having a family. I think there's a lot of men right now that have just given up on the prospect entirely and simply shouldn't be a father because they're too weak and useless and feeble and broke and uninteresting. To have that level of responsibility. speaker-1: Yeah, pathetic men are pathetic men are basically evil. You've done something immoral by being pathetic. Like this classic idea of like I would never cheat on my wife. It's like, well is anyone asking you to? It's like I would never nuclear bomb New York City, but I also can't. Like I don't get credit for not nuking New York City when I can't. speaker-0: Right. If you're three hundred pounds you can't sh- speaker-1: Capable of destruction, you don't get any points for not being destructive. Being a weak little docile man who sits on his phone and scrolls Twitter and masturbates and plays Madden and smokes weed, this is not vaguely appropriate. And if you are a loser, stop that right now. It's not acceptable. Go to the gym, lift some weights, shut up, go to the gym, go talk to that pretty girl anyway. Go get strong anyway. Go make yourself a powerful dominant man. And if you are not a powerful dominant Man, then you deserve nothing. I'm gonna quote another scripture at you. This one is Matthew I think twenty-three twenty-two, but I could be getting wrong, it's Matthew. And it says, To those who have more will be given, and they will have abundance. And to those who have not, what they do have will be taken. Mm-hmm. This is a universal law of man. If you have nothing, the few things you have will be stripped from you and you will die a pathetic loser. And

frankly, you probably deserve to die a pathetic loser. But if you start to develop, things cycle. If you go to the gym, you just say, you know what? I'm gonna go to the gym and I maybe I can only bench 95 pounds. So what? Bench 95 pounds. And guess what? The people in the gym, the guys who bench 315, are gonna say, fuck yeah, little bro, we love this. Keep lifting, and they'll be able to spot you and they will turn it up. and you will get immediate positive feedback. When you go out there And you say, I'm gonna go apply for more jobs, I'm gonna go learn a skill. It's really easy to learn skills. You can go to YouTube and you can just learn how to do stuff. When you say, I'm gonna go to Charisma on Command and I'm gonna watch this YouTube channel about how to be more friendly. When you say, you know what, I'm gonna sign up for tennis club and I'm gonna talk to some people at Tennis Club and make friends. People actually want to make friends. Everyone wants to make friends, and everyone actually rewards this kind of behavior. The problem is when you get stuck in these cycles of being a Loser, then what you do have is taken. But what if you if you start to have, you will have more and you get abundance, and then you climb the hierarchy. And so there are two separate issues here. The first one I was talking about, where you cannot have 80% of men in the top 30%. You will never reach the point where the majority of men are attractive. Women rank the vast majority of men as below average attractive. Which you say that's mathematically illiterate, doesn't make any sense. But they do it anyway, because most men aren't attractive. Completely separate thought, you as an individual man have a duty to become attractive. speaker-0: That's right. Yes, yes. I think that there are sort of two completely different responses to the crisis of masculinity. There's what you're saying, which I agree with, which is this older con conception of masculinity, which is to become strong enough that other people can depend on you. Which which is exactly what your duty is as a man. And that will make you attractive. That will make you pick up your cross and bear it. speaker-1: Pick up your cross and bear it. Come on. speaker-0: But then there's this nihilistic version of masculinity, which you see online from the Andrew Tates of the world, which is that masculinity is, you know, getting women, fucking hoes, dominating people, accumulating money, never being vulnerable, treating sex as status, all of these things. And it's like, okay, like maybe some of that works in the long in in the short term. But in the long term, you just want to become somebody that that that that can be dependent on. You want to signal the ability that you're going to be able to support a family. You're going to be able to be a good Father, you're going to be loyal. You're going to be ethical. You look good. You care about yourself. Because if if if you care about yourself, this is why this is why we don't elect obese people to to the presidency. Because if you cannot control how many calories you intake, it's like, well, why why why should you be able to control the company the the country? Although Donald Trump is technically obese, but he doesn't really look that obese. But like I do think that's like Chris Christie will never have a political career. Like the guy's just too fat. Like I we cannot trust you to do anything if you literally cannot control how much you eat. Why would I trust you with anything? Like I do think there is something to that. speaker-1: The guy's too fat. Why can we trust you? That's a great line. Good episode. speaker-0: Why can I do Let's let's move on to some investment advice. ⁓ because this is something that's really important for young men actually, which is that as a man, you need to know what you're doing with your money is extremely important. And I don't say that because like, you know, like there's this Charlie Kirk clip that went viral ⁓ before he died when when he like, I don't care, I think it was on the ⁓ it was it was on a podcast, I forgot which one it was called, but he essentially said he was like, If you are a man, you have to handle all of the finances. And it's like, I don't think that you have to handle all the finances because you're a man. I just think that it's the it's most likely that you will handle the finances because men are better at finances than women. If you happen to marry an investment banker from Goldman Sachs who's really good at this type of thing, or you happen to marry a female CP C F A, you know, the five percent of those that exist, then great, she could handle the money. But in all likelihood speaker-1: Really only 5% are CFAs that masculine? speaker-0: I don't know, but I would assume so, just because I mean w let's look it up real quick. What percentage of CFAs are women? Okay, fine. speaker-1: At least C F A I know is a woman, but obviously like that's like a really weird sample size. speaker-0: All right, so w ⁓ they're about seventeen percent. ⁓ wait, no no no. That's that's CFO. I wanna know CFA. Sorry, bear with me. speaker-1: Chat GPT just told me approximately nineteen percent of CFA institute members worldwide are women. speaker-0: Okay, there you go. So it's 19%. So it's not quite as dire as I made it out to be. But still, the vast majority of CFAs, CFPs, people who are good with numbers, it's just men. That just is what it is. Men are more interested in things, women are more interested in people. This is a long-standing statistical finding. That's why in more egalitarian societies, such as the Scandinavian countries, you see actually wider disparities between men and women. In nursing professions, in psychology professions, in teaching professions. And then you look at a really non-egalitarian country like Iran, and you actually see that Iran has amongst the highest percentage of female engineers. Not because female women want to be engineers, but because

they think that that's their only path to success. But when you equalize everything and you let men do what they want to do and you let women do what they want to do, you will start to see these patterns emerge even more broadly, which is women are going to gras ⁓ gravitate towards people-based careers. Men are going to gravitate to careers that have to do with things. So engineers, numbers, math, stuff like that. I would be an exception. I have a kind of a more feminine brain, so everybody thinks I'm gay. You know, I much prefer people based careers than I do, you know, I would much rather be a teacher than an engineer. But again, that's weird. But anyway speaker-1: That's why Michael's the empathetic one and I'm the autistic one. I'll give you numbers and Michael will give you, you know, like a a a personal relationship for the same argument. speaker-0: Exactly, exactly, exactly. This is a different way of conceptualizing things. But when it comes to math, even if that's not your strong suit, if you're not great at, you know, investing and it all just hurts your brain and you're like, what the fuck is the stock market? You need to learn it because your wife's probably not and it's your job as the man in the house to know what the fuck you're doing with your money. ⁓ so let's talk a little bit about it. Jake, you mentioned that this isn't something that you're super you know knowledgeable about, so I will transfer the hosting capacity over to you. You could ask me any questions that that you think our audience should know about like basic investing principles and stuff. speaker-1: Yeah, I mean as of right now, I got all my money in SP. So I'm gonna learn from Michael possibly how to fix that. putting all the money in SP puts you ahead of a lot of people who are just not invested in stocks at all. Which so save as much as you possibly can, set aside ten percent, if you can set aside twenty, twenty-five percent, but like at least five or ten percent, set that aside, put in an SP. If you are not doing that, you are failing. Like that's your like base minimum. speaker-0: I that speaker-1: Yeah. Set aside some money, put it in S and P. And that's really easy to do. If you want more advanced techniques, now we got Michael. So Michael, give us like we're gonna like build a a like a pyramid of advancedness on it. Yeah so step one, I save ten percent and I drop it in S P and ⁓ you know, I re every week I put my money in the stock market. By the way, don't try to time S P. What you actually want to do is you want to invest on a set schedule. Like I put my you know, t my paycheck I get every two weeks and I dump 10% in automatically because that would naturally help you buy more and less at the right times. Because when the stock price is lower, you should buy more. The thing is when it's lower, the same amount of money will actually buy more stock. When the product price is higher The same amount of money will buy less stock. And so this is one of the natural market correcting forces that will happen in it. Do not try to time the market. Invest the same amount every two weeks or every month or every whenever you get your paycheck. And that's like that's step one. Step two, Michael. What's the next mo what's the next thing to like look into being a little better than that? speaker-0: Well, I think that's really good advice. You know, there's the famous Warren Buffett million dollar bet that, you know, an S P five hundred index fund would actually beat professional hedge funds over ten years. And Buffett won that bet easily. So it was essentially over ten years. You saw the S P index fund gained like a certain percentage cumulatively, whereas the hedge fund basket gained another ⁓ you know percentage point cumulatively I don't have the numbers offhand, but the hedge fund basket was significantly worse than the S P basket. So there's no sense in trying to pick individual stocks or try to beat the S P. Like you're probably not going to do that. ⁓ what I would say, what I what I would emphasize besides at the SP 500 and buying ETFs to track the S P five hundred is to make sure that you're putting it in the right speaker-1: Describe describe to our audience what's an ETF. speaker-0: Yeah, so an ETF is an exchange traded ⁓ traded fund. And essentially what that is is you have individual stocks ⁓ and you're like, ⁓ well if I just buy Amazon or if I buy Costco or if I buy Google, you know, what prevents you know that company from going bankrupt tomorrow because maybe the CEO gets shot or maybe a massive scandal breaks and I lose all my money. And it's like, yes, that's a really big problem, which is why instead of buying individual stocks, you buy ETFs, which are essentially tickers. That track the market. So for example, SPY SPY is an ETF that tracks the SP 500. Well, this is the SP 500. The SP 500 are the 500 500 biggest and most profitable companies in the United States. So when you buy an ETF that tracks the SP 500, you're buying a tiny little piece of all 500 of those stocks. And that's what you want to do. So when you so an ETF is essentially an Easter basket, okay, and there's All sorts of different Easter baskets that you can buy. You can buy an Easter basket that includes 500 of the most profitable companies in the United States, which should be the SP 500. You could buy an Easter basket that has a tiny percentage of all of the stocks in the entire world, which is a total world market ETF. You could buy an ETF such as QQQ, which tracks the NASDAQ 100, which is the 100 largest and most profitable tech companies. You can buy all sorts of different ETFs. But what you want to do is buy ETFs. Opposed to buying stocks. Why? Because one of the key principles to investing is diversification. You want to be diversified. Now that brings me to your question, which is what do I do besides buying the SP 500? There is this illusion that the S P 500 is diversification. If you're buying an ETF that tracks the

SP, you are diversified. That's a bit of a misnomer because while you might think you're buying 500 stocks. Forty percent of the SP is comprised of seven stocks, like the Magnificent Seven. You know, you got Amazon, Google, NVIDIA, Tesla. So it's like you're really heavily concentrated in AI tech stocks when you buy the SP. So if we ever see the AI bubble pop, the SP is going to tank along with the Qs and other ⁓ ETFs that track tech and AI related stocks. So there's this notion that you're super diversified if you're only in the SP, but you're really not. So you might want to diversify a little bit further out from that. But to start, buying the SP is a great thing to do. The other thing that's really important is noting where you buy it. So anybody who listens to this show, I do not want any listener of split ticket to not have a Roth IRA. I want everybody who listens to the show to open an I Roth IRA. So in order to do that, you will pick a brokerage. So something like Fidelity, Schwab, e-trade, Vanguard, it literally doesn't matter. I personally use Fidelity. You're gonna open a Fidelity account and you're going to create a Roth IRA. And the Roth IRA is a really interesting account where you put money that you've already paid taxes on into your Roth IRA and you invest that money. And then that money grows tax-free. So that's really exciting because if you continuously put money into the Roth IRA, It's going to grow, it's going to compound, it's gonna grow some more, it's gonna grow some more, it's gonna grow some more. And then when you access that money for retirement, you're going to be able to access it completely tax-free. You don't need to pay taxes on it at all. And the reason why that's a good thing to open when you're young is because as a young person, you should assume that you're paying the least amount of taxes right now. You're only gonna get older, you're only gonna get more experience, and you're going to continuously get into higher and higher tax brackets. As you get older and generate more money. So you, if you're gonna pay taxes on your money, you might as well pay the taxes now when you're in the lowest tax bracket, put the money in the Roth IRA. And then when you're 60 and you're in a really high tax bracket, hopefully, because you had a really successful life, you don't need to pay taxes on the money. So it's a great account for a young person to open. You're gonna open your Roth IRA. speaker-1: Serious when he's telling you to avoid taxes. Thing is closing loopholes. speaker-0: I want you to avoid Exactly, exactly. Yes. But you know, in this case, I don't think the Roth Roth IRA is a loophole. I think it's a really wonderful wealth building mechanism. So I want you as a young person to open a Roth IRA. And just because you open a Roth IRA, it doesn't do anything. If you just put money into it, you you haven't done anything yet. You know, people just put money in the Roth IRA and think it's doing something. You actually

to buy stuff. You actually have to invest the money. And then there's this question of okay, well, what should I buy? You should buy ETFs. Now young people get excited, they want to buy individual stocks, they want to s you know, try to, you know, finesse the market. I totally understand that impulse. So if you're going to do that, set aside like one to two thousand dollars and buy some stocks. Maybe you're really bullish on Amazon, maybe you're really bullish on Google, maybe you think Walmart's a good investment, maybe you want to own some NVIDIA, you know, and maybe you hit and maybe something fucking crazy happens and it's like, you know, you you may may maybe you bought fucking sand disk a year ago and it's up fucking, you know, ⁓ my god, my phonograph. speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: And you bought like a thousand and and you're up like six hundred percent. May maybe you get lucky, but chances are you won't, and you'll just end up picking some winners, picking some losers, and you'll just average out to what you would have gotten if you just invested all in the SP. But I understand the impulse. So you could set aside some money to buy some individual stocks if you want, and then you're going to put a lot of money into ETFs. The SP is a great place to start. And we could talk later on in some other episodes about other things to buy and other things to diversify. But if you just buy the SP, you're fine. And especially in a tax advantaged account like a Roth IRA, it's particularly fine because you're not accessing that money until you're like sixty anyway. So the real reason why you want to diversify outside of the SP is to protect yourself in an economic downturn. So if you only owned the SP during, you know, the dot com bubble, like your whole account just would have crashed. You would have lost everything. So if you need this money in six to ten years, maybe you're like 22 and you're like, I want to buy a house when I'm 30. So that's eight years. And you're like, I want to invest that money because I want to get eight years of gains before I put the down payment on the house. If that's what you're doing, then we should have a different conversation. You're not putting that in the Roth IRA, you're gonna put that in the taxable brokerage account. And you're going to invest that a little bit more conservatively because in the event of an AI bubble, you don't want to lose 30 or 40% of the money that you save for a down payment. So in that case, we would buy some international ETFs, ⁓ and we would maybe buy some bonds and we would make a little bit of a cons more conservative portfolio. We would cap our upside a little bit, but we would prevent, but we would protect ourselves against a bubble pop or massive economic downturn. In the case of a Roth IRA, you're talking about 30 or 40 years from now. So it doesn't really matter. You could put the money in the SP. And if you have another lost decade or the bubble pop and it crashes, yeah, that's super

depressing. Every time you open up your fidelity, you have to see that your money's gone. But you're in this for the long game, and it's next to impossible to lose money in the SP over the long game. If you're in the market for 15, 20, 25, 30, 35 years, you're not gonna lose money. You could lose five, six, or seven years, but you can't lose with that long of a horizon. So retirement accounts. speaker-1: Michael is not guaranteeing that you're going to win. speaker-0: Thank you, Jay. That's true. I I I think that like, you know, I mean, may there might be like a 20 year period that you could pinpoint in history. I don't even know. I mean, like, but like I said, you know what I mean that that's why they always have these disclaimers where, you know, like, you know, past success is not an indicator of future results. That's definitely true. Something crazy could totally happen. I'm not guaranteeing anything. But for the most part, you're pretty safe. ⁓ so yeah, just to, you know, we'll we'll c stop it there. I know that this stuff gets heavy and boring for a lot of people. If you're listening to the show and you don't already have a Roth IRA, I want you to open one. And I want you to put as much money as possible. The maximum contribution to a Roth IRA is $7,500 a year. It works out to about $165 a week. It should be a personal goal for anybody listening to this show to max out your Roth IRA every year. Now, if you cannot afford $600 $165 a week, I recognize that's a lot of money. That's fine. Start with $10. Start with $5. Do not let in Do not be deterred from investing because you do not have a lot of money. You should start small because the power, the eighth wonder of the world of compound interest is a really amazing thing. If you start investing at 20 versus start investing at 30, you're talking about, you know, I think it's around a million dollars of gains just in that 10-year period by it w by the time you're 60. So it really ⁓ matters more that you start early, not that you start with a lot. So open a Roth IRA, try to max it out. And if you can't max it out, get as close to $7,500 as possible. Buy some individual stocks if you want, because you want to have fun. But for the most part, put it in ETFs such as the SB 500, the Qs, or total market ⁓ for a little bit of additional ⁓ diversification if you want. And just let it hang out and enjoy the wonders of compound interest. It's really an amazing thing to see your money grow. It's extremely exciting. And it's one of the best things that you could do for yourself. And the last thing I'll say is when you take a woman out on a date, talk to her about how you opened up your Roth IRA. Don't talk too about it because she'll get bored. speaker-1: Don't talk to her about this. speaker-0: You don't think I think that it's a good idea though, like b you know, just like not like bore her with the explanations of it, but just like show like that you care about yourself and you care about your life and

your l you have a long term vision for your life and like you took the time to learn about this. Like you don't need to have a twenty minute conversation. speaker-1: yeah, no, I've got a Roth RA, like everything's set up, I make good money. Now tell me about you. Like do not spend time talking about your finances. She doesn't care. She wants to know you have them, that you know it, that you are going to take care of her, and then do not talk about it. speaker-0: That's what I would do. She doesn't care about the details. She just wants to know that you know. So that's all you have to do. Okay. So we'll talk more about this. ⁓ but that's that's the the entry level stuff. You know, let us know if it was helpful, if it was confusing, if I lost you. ⁓ I do think this stuff is really important. So I'm I'm I'm, you know, hoping to help as as much people as I can with it. Shall we move on to segments, Jake? speaker-1: Let's do it. I went l first last time, so hit me with your segment this time and I'll try to not be as homophobic on it. speaker-0: Okay, okay, I like that. I like that. Okay, so I do have a segment for you. I'm trying to think of which segment I want to do. Okay, yes. ⁓ so this should be a pretty interesting segment, I think. Basically, what I'm gonna ask you to do, Jake, is I'm going to present three arguments that I think are really good for why. you should believe in religion. And I'm curious which argument, in your opinion, is the best one or the most convincing one, or the argument that you would use to convince a non-believer to believe. So I'll try to just give a rough overview of the three, and then you could pick one and elaborate on why you think that one is the best. ⁓ so the first are so there's three arguments that I think are pretty ⁓ are pretty convincing. So I would say that the first one is the contingency argument, which is like the idea of like why is there something rather than nothing? So it's like everything does exist, but it's also equally conceivable that nothing existed. And it's like you exist because of your parents, it Earth exists because of some sort of cosmic process. And like these processes, these processes all depend on a bunch of physical laws and stuff like that. ⁓ But you have to ask yourself like why does anything exist at all? Like why can't the universe itself just like it you know simply exist? And I think that like that is I don't know if I explain that great, but that's one argument that I hear a lot. ⁓ whereas you know, an atheist just Okay, you want me to do that? speaker-1: Do exist, where a contingent thing is something that exists but could have failed to exist, like humans, trees, planets, like your parents didn't have to have sex, you might not have existed. Contingent things, so that's one, contingent things do exist. Two, contingent things require explanations. So this, you know, from the the idea of sufficient reason that everything that exists has an explanation for why it exists rather than it doesn't. The universe itself is contingent. It could have conceivably have been different, or maybe not existed at all. you sometimes put some of the like fine-tuning arguments into here like could gravity have been different and therefore we couldn't hold together, you know, all these kind of things. The so that that's the so one, things exist. Two, things that exist require explanation. Three, the universe itself is contingent. Four, the ultimate explanation cannot be contingent. Because explaining one contingent thing through another just creates circular. And so the you know the the the classic idea that, you know, the They say, ⁓ I think the the world is actually on the back of a turtle shell. And they say, Well, what's the turtle on? And they say, Well that that turtle is on the back of standing on the back of another turtle. Well, what's that turtle on? On the back of another turtle. Well, what's that turtle? It's turtles all the way down. It's like that's a bad explanation. Like the ultimate thing cannot itself be contingent. Okay, but five. Therefore a necessary being exists. Something must exist that cannot fail to exist. Whose existence doesn't depend on anything else. Okay. That's God. That's a contingency argument. Yeah. speaker-0: Yes, that's a contingency argument. The other two. Next one is the fine-tuning argument, which is one that I'm very sort of interested in and and speaker-1: The fine tuning argument is basically just a sub-idea of the contingency argument though. speaker-0: Yeah, like my so my my understanding of the fine-tuning argument is that like the earth is like really well suited for life. Like it's like amazingly well suited for life. And it's like the all the fundamental laws and constants of the universe that can allow this to happen, that can allow all this complex chemistry and these stars and for life to exist. Like if any one of these factors were substantially different, complex life as we know it would be completely impossible. So, like what the fine-tuning argument essentially says is like, why is the universe so precisely designed for permitting life? And one explanation or answer to that question is that an intelligent creator intended a universe capable of producing conscious life. And then the third one that I wanted to to posit as a great one is the hard problem of consciousness. Which is a huge problem for atheists. It's like very hard to understand what consciousness is. It's like, why does my brain interact with my body? Like, that's just as weird as if my brain started interacting with your body. Like the fact that there's a conscious experience here is impossible to explain through science. And you could keep getting, you know, it's like. know, if y you mean to tell me that if you just put certain molecules together, if you put certain atoms together, that like all of a sudden you organize them in a certain way and all of a sudden poof, consciousness. Like that doesn't make any

sense. It it it's something that transcends materialism. And then that's when you start getting into these panpsychist ideas, which is whether maybe everything is consciousness, maybe every single particle is consciousness. And that's like one way to possibly refute the hard problem of consciousness that the religious types like to bring up. But also like Panpsychism has a lot of its other problems. So this this issue of consciousness is a very big problem for the atheist to contend with. So we have those three arguments there. Those are the three that I've kind of heard the most that I think are the most interesting. What are your thoughts on them? Which which which one do you think is like what do you think is the strongest evidence for God effectively? What is the argument that you use the most? If you could only use one. speaker-1: I think it depends on who you're approaching. I think there are basically three different kinds of arguments. And all three of the arguments you made there are classical arguments, where you're arguing for the idea of God and you're sort of starting there. is the kind of thing that like Aristotle or Aquinas might do. I think the contingency argument is very convincing. I think the contingency argument, is as far as I can tell, essentially unrefutable. You know, it's ⁓ a modified or even stronger version of the sort of unmoved mover idea. ⁓ I don't think that gets you very close to Christ though. But I do think that kind of gets you out of atheism almost immediately. ⁓ I don't think the fine-tuning argument's very good because the anthropic principle I think kind of stops it. Do you explain that? And so like it's it it it like we're in a world where this happened. And so the fact that we're discussing it means it happened. And so the odds of it happening given that it happened are one, not one in a hundred trillion or whatever. And then particularly you can expand this idea when you discuss the idea of like possibly like multiverse or multiple universes, where there could be an infinite number of universes where all of the things that could have happened did happen. And so of course you're in the world where it happened such that you could exist. Otherwise you wouldn't exist. Like it's just kind of it's it's sort of self refuting. Like the the odds are wrong because you're presupposing the wrong p can conditions, the ones that you see are the ones that allow you to see duh. And so the fact that you see them at all means it's given that they happened this way. So the odds are one. I think that's a fairly easy refutation of the of that idea. and then this this third argument, which was the third argument again speaker-0: Consciousness. speaker-1: Consciousness. I think that one's the silliest one. I think that's terrible argument. I think it's a God of the Gaps argument. Mm-hmm. ⁓ and it's it's the exact same argument people used to make, like, well how could we have diversity of life? You know, sort of the watchmaker

argument. That life seems so, you know, fine-tuned or whatever to whatever. And then it turns out, you know, we have this GOAT Darwin who comes along and kind of solves the problem. And the ⁓ really thing that a really cool thing Alex O'Connor says is Alex O'Connor is debating an a ⁓ Christian and he says, you know, imagine if you know this is on video, it's gonna go on YouTube. Imagine people in a thousand years are watching this video. Do you think anyone in the thousand years would date this and go, huh? I guess that's kinda interesting. They hadn't solved the problem of evil yet. Like, no, probably not. Like you're not gonna like have a science that just like solves that problem conclusively. But you absolutely it's very, very feasible to say, huh. They hadn't solved the problem of consciousness yet. Just like if you watched the debate in 1750, you might say, how do we get the diversity of life? It's like, huh, we can date this debate as pre-Darwin, given they hadn't solved it yet. And so just the idea that, like, ⁓ we haven't solved this yet, therefore God, I think is a really bad argument. But all three of these are classical arguments for God. I think that these are kind of useful for someone who is so stiff on the like, I hate God or I don't want God, or I'm like, they kind of like They like they they think it's like ridiculous that there could possibly even be a god. Like they've they've defaulted to kind of a nihilistic, materialistic atheism. I think these are decent arguments to invoke to that person. I think presuppositionalism, where you explain how their worldview is inconsistent or nonsensical, and you kind of reductio ad absurdum them, you know, they they say like, ⁓ like, I don't believe in objective morality, and you go, okay, well that's nonsense. Or they say, I believe in it because of utilitarianism. You go, okay, well that's nonsense. Or I believe, you like, and you kind of walk through how their worldview is less coherent than the Christian worldview. And so instead of being focused on the concept of God, you're focused on the ontological truth of the Trinity. I think these arguments are much better for people who are more philosophically minded about things and are looking for kind of like a rational truth behind it. But then ultimately, I don't think any of those arguments bring you to Christianity in the truest sense. Because if you believe in something because you have a rational argument for it, If you believe in God because of a rational argument, you've now made an idol out of that rational argument. You now believe in the argument and therefore God, rather than God and therefore the argument. And if some you know genius rhetoricist comes along and defeats their argument, they've now defeated your belief in God. And therefore you never had faith. And so I think ultimately, you know, it's ⁓ it's in John, it's towards the end of John, blessed are those who have not seen and yet believed. And I think that you have to have faith for faith's sake. You believe in Christ because you believe in Christ. And that's circular in yeah, so what? Like I think that's what it actually means to faith. You know, Kierkegaard, the idea of like a leap into faith. And I think that people can actually understand this more clearly when you think about like why do you love your wife or whatever. Or like imagine you know you've been married to, you know, your wife for twenty years, and then some guy you barely know comes along and is like, hey, your wife's cheating on you. In the world where you believe that she's not cheating on you because of reasons, you go, Really? Tell me. And then he says, you know, I saw him with this dude on this Saturday, and you're no, she was with me on that Saturday. It's like, okay, you already didn't have faith in her. You had a rational reason of you know she has an alibi, she wasn't cheating. If you immediately go, No, no, she wasn't, now you have a faith-based response. The same idea on the flip side of like the kind of love for your wife. If someone asks you, like, why do you love your wife? You loved her for twenty years, you know, like In some ways, like three words is too little, but a book is too much. Like or a book is still too little. Like you cannot describe why you love her. There's no rational reason why you love her. You just do. You love her because you love her. And that's kind of the end of the sentence. And on your process of getting to faith through her, you can have rational arguments. You know, you just met her, she seems cool and she seems loyal and she seems nice, and you have all these either classical or presuppositional kind of equivalent arguments. For why you start to like her, for why you start to trust her, for why you kind of develop this relationship. But by the time you get to the point where you are in a true, healthy, correct, loving relationship, you just have faith. And so I think, you know, this is the neo the neo orthodoxy argument from like a Karl Barth kind of idea. That the best argument for Christ is Christ. And that's the the it's that's the end of it. And I that's not very useful to say to an atheist who's like, I don't have faith. You're like, well, just should. It's like, well, okay, that's not very productive. But to somebody who is very, very pro-Christianity and kind of wants to be Christian, but just kind of isn't quite there yet, I think that's the way to get them over the hump is just have faith. You know, you are commanded to love thy God. And you just have faith. And so I think there's three different kinds of arguments. There's presuppositional, there's classical. And there's neo-orthodoxy. And I think that you gave me three different classical arguments, two of which I think are bad, one of which I think is very good, but none of those are gonna make you Christian. You're not gonna get a classical argument for Christianity. You could get a presuppositional argument for the can for the coherency

of the Trinity and the sort of ontological likely truth of it. But I think if you want to be a Christian, you just gotta have faith. speaker-0: Yeah. Have you read any of ⁓ Ross Duthat's books? speaker-1: Haven't. I are th I have one on my list but I haven't read ⁓ yet. Do you recommend it? speaker-0: He just ⁓ came out ⁓ I think like a year ago with a book called Believe Why Everyone Should Be Religious and it's interesting to me. I haven't read it, but it's its whole idea is conv you know, he spends a lot of time talking to people who are irreligious, so he knows the kinds of arguments and the kinds of thoughts to to to make. ⁓ he's he's passionately Christian. and I don't know, it's just a it's a book that I that I really want to read that I'm interested in reading. So if you know, maybe you'll read it too and we could discuss. speaker-1: Alright. That was a long answer to your segment. I feel like your segment took a while to set up and then it took a while to answer. ⁓ okay, my segment for you. You get to change one fact of American history. Whether it's like actually this president won the election, or actually we never did this war, or actually we never ratified the Constitution or this amendment or whatever. Like you get to change a fact anywhere between seventeen seventy-six and today. So if your fact is I didn't eat that sandwich yesterday, fair enough. But like you get to change one fact from American history. What would you change? What would you wish happened differently? speaker-0: ⁓ That's really interesting. I think I would I think if I had to if I had to change one fact of American history, it would I would probably want to prevent Abraham Lincoln's assassination. I think that would be the thing to do. Because I I think that I I think that that had such massive cascading effects. And I also, you know, there there's like this particular theory of a riot, which is that like when, you know, when one person initiates a riot, they had a threshold of zero. And then when somebody else does it, they had a threshold of one. And then another person did it and they had a threshold of two. Three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. And eventually you get to a thousand, two thousand, three thousand. And eventually the five thousandth and twenty-seventh person to join the riot, he's actually not that crazy. But the first person to start the riot, he was really fucking nuts. And so you egg end up getting to a place where really good people can end up doing bad things as part of a social contagion. And I would argue that the person who assassinated Abraham Lincoln. Was the person who had a threshold of zero. So I think that that is one reason why I would want to undo that part of American history. I also think, you know, that we had this kind of archetypical problem where the the old order had become morally intolerable, but you have this this other element where destroying an evil institution does not tell you. How to what am I saying here? Like construct construct a replacement. Like you need someone who's you you basically have this you you want the the old South not to be restored as though slavery had never happened, but you also don't want a society to be rebuilt through vengeance and coercion. So I think that Lincoln might have been uniquely positioned in this time of American history to inspire moral change through reconciliation and legitimacy and restraint, which isn't what happened. So I do think that for from that side of things, from more of a classical conservative perspective, the death of Abraham Lincoln was a major tragedy. And then I also would potentially make the argument that that was the threshold for sort of a degrad ⁓ the the start of a degradation of the American political landscape and of American culture. So that's just kind of like it was a little bit of a sloppy answer, but that's that that was my first impulse. speaker-1: Yeah, no, it reminds me of really good book by Christopher Browning, I think. I might have that last name slightly wrong, but roughly that name, called Ordinary Men, which is an analysis of a police platoon or police battalion or whatever whatever the the word for that size of grouping is during the World War II Nazis. And so these were, you know, middle-aged men who did not grow up in the Hitler youth kind of propaganda machine. They were like regular dudes, they're ordinary men. Men who are suddenly finding themselves in war. And you know, they're there are police who have now been militarized and are marching into Poland. And it starts with, you know, we're at war, we have to, you know, fight the soldiers. And then, you know, we're at war, we have to round up the military-aged men, because those are going to become soldiers. And it it it escalates step by step until, spoiler alert on World War II, the Nazis are bad. And by the end of it, these ordinary regular men are shooting pregnant women in the back of the head in ditches. And they're like vomiting and throwing up and they're physically ill. It's a true story. It's like a you know, he's a historian who went through and analyzed the the life of these men and they're physically sick while doing it. But you don't leave the dirty work to your friends. And the the crazy thing is, a huge portion of them were told that they could go home. They were not. physically coerced into it. If you want to be a pussy and go home, you can. Mm-hmm. But we this has to be done for the good of your state. And if you want to leave it to your friends, that's on you, man. That's kind of the formula they had. And so these people there and there are some of them in the book that are sadistic, who seem to almost be enjoying murdering these pregnant women, these largely Jewish pregnant women. But there's a lot of them who are literally like Like their bodies are rejecting what their minds are making them do. And it's just a fascinating idea about how do you get ordinary men to do evil things. And this idea of like the riot of like the the five thousandth man, how crazy is he? You know, he you might have a non-crazy person doing evil, evil things. Yes. And I think the best analysis of this absolutely is ordinary men. speaker-0: Mm-hmm. ⁓ wow, that's r yeah, that's really interesting. I'd definitely like to read that. All right. Well, that concludes this episode, everybody. Thank you for tuning in. ⁓ if you enjoy the show and you want to support our work, please hit that subscribe button, that follow button on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts, and we will see you next week.