#1081: Tucker, The Man And His Empiricist

Red alert, red alert, red alert, red alert, red alert, red alert, red alert, red alert, red alert.

Knowledge fight.

Dan and Jordan, I am sweating.

Knowledgepight.com.

It's time to pray.

I have great respect for knowledge fight.

Knowledge fight.

I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys, saying we are the bad guys.

Knowledge my fight.

Dan and Jordan.

Knowledge fight.

I need money.

I need money.

Andy in Kansas.

Andy.

Stop it.

Andy and Kansas.

Andy in Kansas.

Andy.

It's time to pray.

Andy in Kansas, you're on the air.

Thanks for holding it.

Hello, Alex.

I'm a fifth-time caller.

I'm a huge fan.

I love your room.

Knowledge fight.

Knowledgefight.com.

I love you.

Hey, everybody.

Welcome back to Knowledge Fight.

I'm Dan.

I'm Jordan.

We're a couple dudes.

Like to sit around, worship at the altar of Celine, talk a little bit about Alex Johnson.

Oh, indeed we are.

Dan.

Jordan.

Dan.

Jordan.

Quick question for you.

What's up?

What's your bright spot today, buddy?

My bright spot is I'm fucking around and thinking about bringing back a matter of time because

I accidentally discovered that MacGyver is on streaming.

Classic MacGyver.

All right.

And I said, why not?

I'll watch the pilot of MacGyver.

Because why not?

I haven't seen MacIver in a long time.

Yeah.

I watched it when I was a kid.

Did you?

And I think there were more jokes about MacIver than I've seen.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I've seen definitely a few.

I also think a fair amount of them blur together with Walker, Texas Ranger.

And so, like, I'm not sure exactly what's Norris, what's Richard Dean Anderson.

And so I turned it on.

And I have to tell you, I was overwhelmed by the opening credits.

It is so much boy stuff

from my childhood.

Like, it's just him doing a bunch of stuff that rambunctious boys might do in the opening.

Okay.

It's just great.

It tickled something in my brain.

Yeah.

And

I love it.

I can't wait to watch however many seasons there are.

I don't believe I've ever seen a full episode of MacGyver, but I've seen the last eight minutes of 15 episodes of MacGyver, and they are very similar.

Yeah.

I know that I've watched plenty.

Yeah.

Enough to answer this question that I don't really know.

And that is, what does he do?

Watch the pilot.

I don't know.

Is he?

I feel like he's an independent contractor in some way.

He's not wholly working for the

force.

You know what I mean?

Well, the government definitely tells him we need you to do something.

Right.

And then he, but he is also told you can turn down this job.

Right.

You don't have to do this.

It's a very crazy.

It's a very strange relationship he has with the government.

Almost like altruistic in a sense.

Like he's like, oh, the government needs me again.

I'll just help him out.

Yeah.

So in this one, there's an explosion in a negative third-floor chemical plant.

Oh, no.

And it turns out that it was sabotage by the head scientist because he had created a way to get rid of the ozone layer accidentally and he didn't want it to fall into the wrong hands.

Okay.

So he lured the only other scientist in the world who understood what he was working on

to

his lab.

Yeah.

Played a chess game with him and then blew it up.

Okay.

So they both died.

No, they both survived.

They both survived?

Yeah.

Oh, no.

A lot of other people died.

But they survived, so MacGyver's got to go down and get them.

Oh my God.

And there's a chemical leak.

Yeah.

And so the military is going to shoot a missile at them.

Of course.

This is a hell of a pilot.

Yes.

And while he's down there, he meets the assistant to one of these scientists.

Of course.

This lady.

Sure.

And she is.

like the gal from Indiana Jones.

Like she's an adventurer type.

All right.

She's ready to go.

Okay.

They kiss like three times.

I'm sorry.

I googled it.

Do they know each other?

No.

Wow.

That's quick.

They thought they were going to die, and she's like, I just want to thank you.

Oh, that's fair.

And then they kissed two more times.

Wow.

And I googled it, and she's not in another episode.

I mean, scandalized.

I hate to say this about MacGyver, but perhaps his one character flaw is he likes to hit it and quit it.

Yeah, he was loose with the lips.

Also, he's a big brother, and that's cool, and he seems to live in a planetarium.

I don't know.

He's like a superhero.

But a kid.

But a kid.

Yeah, he's like a little boy's imaginary superhero best friend who doesn't have superpowers, but is a good dad, but a dad who's your older brother.

Yeah.

I worry about how much I'm going to uncover about things.

from my cantankerous young boy phases,

eras of life that I'm like, oh, wait, that was all just MacGyver.

All of a sudden, you realize that most of your memories are actually MacGyver episodes.

Interesting.

I didn't blow up that lab.

You were secretly experimented on by the government to teach you about MacGyver, like in the Matrix, but instead of

learning kung fu, you just know MacGyver storylines.

Yeah.

There's also four points where I audibly said, nope, but I love it still.

It's a good thing.

All right.

All right.

So what's your bright spot?

My bright spot, Dan, is that for the first time in a good long while, my beloved Cubs have won a postseason game.

Go, Cubs.

Go.

They will play today, this afternoon at 4 o'clock for the chance to make it to the National League Division Series.

Nice.

But for the time being, it's them versus the Padres.

One game each.

The dads.

This is the third.

This is the rubber match, and I'm excited to watch it tonight.

I hope we will be wrapped up in time for you to take that in.

Oh, yeah.

I I will have a cold beer in my hand and chips like an old-fashioned man from the 1940s.

Nice.

I will connect with my ancestors.

We went to go see a movie earlier in the week.

Yes, we did.

So we were down near Wrigley, and it was during one of the games, and there was counter-terrorism on the L.

Yep.

And it was very, it was overwhelming.

Yeah, there's going to be a lot of people around.

Our city has been invaded.

Yep.

So, Jordan, today we have an episode to go over.

All right.

And without telling you too much about what we're going to be talking about, I wanted to give you a little out-of-context drop to whet your appetite.

If demons do exist, we ought to be heads up about it.

Got to be heads up.

Heads up.

Is he wrong?

I mean, no.

You know, I was just thinking, you can't plan for every disaster, but you can plan for some disasters.

And if there are demons, I think we should plan for them.

Right.

We have, if we assume demons are real, right.

Big assumption.

But we got to assume it.

Yep.

Heads up.

The risk is too great.

I mean, if they are real and we're not prepared for them, we're fucked.

Yeah, because they're tricky.

They're unstoppable.

Yeah.

So we will get into something about demons.

But first, before we do that, let's take a little moment to say hello to some new wonks.

Ooh, it's a demon feast.

So first, thank you very much for feeding my bespoke woke mind virus.

Thank you so much, Joanna, policy wonk.

I'm a policy wonk.

Thank you very much.

Beswoke.

Beswoke.

Beswoke.

Next, from the church of Dick Flackheel and the Latter-day Erections.

Thank you so much, Jeranao Policy Wonk.

I'm a policy wonk.

Thank you very much.

Dick Flaccid, sorry.

Gotcha.

Next, Dan, this is Jordan from the future.

You're a great friend, and I love you.

Ooh, thank you so much, you're an awful policy wonk.

I'm a policy wonk.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Yeah, well, I mean, it's good to know that in the future we're still friends.

Or I'm a weirdo.

Or it could be like in the very near future.

Or, yeah, or like maybe it's maybe it's deeper into the future after all of this stuff has broken us up and torn us apart.

And I was just like, I have one message on my deathbed to get back to Dan.

Well, here we are.

I'm glad you took the time, and it means a lot.

Of course.

So we also got a technocrat in the mix room.

So thank you so much.

I've got a small coffee company, outdoor coffee cult in Oregon called Hush Hush Coffee.

And I wanted to send you guys some coffee and officially offer you a sponsorship for your roast segment in honor of Owen leaving.

Handbider.

Thank you so much.

You're now a technocrat.

I'm I'm a policy wonk.

Four stars.

Go home to your mother and tell her you're brilliant.

Someone, sodomite, sent me a bucket of poop.

Daddy Shark.

Bomb, bomb, bump, bump, bump.

Jar Jar Binks has a Caribbean black accent.

He's a loser, little, little kitty baby.

I don't want to hate black people.

I renounce Jesus Christ.

Thank you so much.

Thank you very much.

It occurs to me that I may have forgotten to reply to that immediate moment because I would like some of that coffee.

Yeah, I don't need a sponsorship.

If you want to send Jordan coffee, he drinks a lot of it.

Absolutely.

I drink so much.

I will say that on our last Owen episode, I did intend to write a roast.

Right.

I did intend to, but I sat down and I started thinking of roast jokes.

Yeah.

And I realized I hate roast comedy.

It's the worst form of comedy, I think, possible.

Yeah.

Clever ways of saying, this guy sucks.

You suck.

Okay.

The end.

So, Jordan,

there's no denying it.

This show has been light on wackiness recently.

And I think we've all felt the weight of its absence, especially as the world descends into like a real bad

bad time.

We need that.

We need some.

So laying in bed for a few days,

I had the thought, you know, I was sick.

Enough.

Let's get wacky.

So as soon as I got to feeling better, I got straight to this task, and I wasn't going to accept anything short of succeeding.

And it didn't take me long to strike gold.

On September 1st, Tucker Carlson released an interview with a former journalist named Lee Strobel entitled, quote, Possessions, Miracles, Visions, and Encounters with Angels and Demons.

And I said, say less.

Yeah, no.

I'm in.

You stop drilling.

You have hit oil, my friend.

Yep.

We all know

Tucker was recently attacked by a demon.

He's recently attacked by a demon.

This is finally him learning more about how to fight back.

Right.

This is great.

And an opportunity for him to open up.

Of course.

This is going to be tell us more.

Yeah.

So,

what do you think about demons?

Yeah.

You know, traditionally against them, but maybe they're misunderstood.

You know, I feel like perhaps we've gotten trapped in a dogmatic idea of good versus evil, and maybe that has kept us from evolving as a species, and demons are a fundamental aspect of something that we need to address as something part of our insights.

I'll spoil this for you.

Lee is opposed.

Opposed.

Okay.

Well, then I'll go with that.

Yeah.

So we start off here with Tucker giving a

little bit of an intro,

Solomon's guest.

So we're told there's no state religion in the West, certainly not in the United States, but in fact, there is.

It's scientism.

It's the worship of science.

It's the belief, and all of us learned this at a young age, that everything around us, everything we experience, can be measured by people in white coats.

That's science.

If it can't be measured, it's not real.

The problem with this religion is that our life, our daily experience, contradicts it.

So a belief in science does not require a person to think that our current understanding of science is capable of explaining everything in the world.

This This is a semantic game that Tucker is playing where he's imposing on his opponents a position that they don't hold.

Science can explain a lot, and it can explain a shitload more than it could 100 years ago.

So, anyone who's not a dipshit would understand that in a hundred years, we'll be able to explain a lot more than we can now.

Science doesn't purport to be able to explain everything, although most people who are into reality probably would concede that almost everything could be explained if we understood how everything worked.

Probably.

Science is about repeatability, for the most part.

It's a process that takes ideas and tests them to see if they reach valid conclusions.

What I mean is that science doesn't just say that antibiotics kill infections and therefore this must be so.

Rigorous trials and repeated studies that tested antibiotics against infections arrived at that conclusion that they were effective in fighting them, so that's become science's position.

If new, repeatable, credible information were to come to light that indicated that they didn't work that way, science would change with that new information.

Science isn't a religion, and this formulation is actually Tucker hiding the ball about what his actual argument is, which we'll get to as we go along.

As for the unexplained things that we experience in our day-to-day life, some of that can probably be explained by science you just don't understand.

Other parts of it might be stuff that can't be explained by our current body of scientific knowledge, but will be explained by a new discovery that's just waiting to happen.

Sure.

Or it could be magic.

It's possible.

Yes.

It is possible that we we could all be, in some sense, particles given mass by a Higgs field.

And that, in a certain sense, we are just moving through jello up and down like a wave.

Or, of course, could be God.

Could be magic.

Could be.

Any of these things are possible and scientism is a cult.

That does make sense.

And all you need to know is that we're all having supernatural experiences all the fucking time.

That sounds true.

Constantly, all of us are seeing, hearing, tasting, feeling things that can't be measured by science, but it doesn't make them any less real.

These are, by definition, supernatural.

Supernatural experiences are a feature of everyone's life.

And if we're honest, we'll admit that.

Tucker is saying that we're seeing, hearing, tasting, and feeling things that cannot be measured by science, which is strange because that's all of our senses except smell.

Why aren't people smelling supernatural stuff?

Okay.

All right.

Okay.

I'm going to follow this train of thought.

Please.

If everyone

experiences the supernatural, does it not then no longer deserve the term super?

Yeah, it's just natural.

It's just regular natural way that we don't understand it.

Yeah, it's just natural.

Or like not even that.

If you're tasting something, then we can measure like how spicy it is, right?

We can't see it.

What are those steps and yeah levels and you know scoval units yeah many of the things that you are seeing tasting feeling are in fact very measurable by your own senses right yeah yeah Tucker isn't talking about tasting a ghost or something here.

This is actually just a reference to an idea in Lee Strobel's book where someone he's interviewing blows his mind by telling him that science can't describe the smell of coffee.

Sensory experiences are tough to capture in words, largely because there's a disconnect between an experience and the awareness of the experience.

Every person's reaction to a description of coffee relies on their subjective take on it.

So putting that subjective description into more objective terms is difficult.

But that doesn't mean that science can't explain why some things smell the way they do.

This is fairly basic stuff.

It's something that we use so effectively that most people probably don't even realize it.

For instance, natural gas is odorless, but it's also super dangerous.

Can we measure it with science?

Well, when companies produce it, they add an odorizer to the gas so people can detect a leak more easily.

Sure.

They can do that because the scientific method has uncovered various compounds that have certain smells.

Your experience of smelling one of these odorizers may be different from mine, but the arrangement of atoms that create the stimulus that we describe differently is science.

Anyway, the point is that we aren't constantly running around having supernatural experiences.

If you want to add some importance to the unique experience of tasting a peach and that that importance improves your life, then I wish you the best with it.

But that does not invalidate science and you sound like an idiot.

I appreciate anybody who could write an entire book that I think his thesis boils down to, explain example with your science.

Yes.

It does.

Except it's a little dumber.

Yeah, I mean, ultimately

it comes down to like, well, I don't understand this.

Prove that.

Like, man, what are we doing here?

And I think that we're going to have a tough time because I'm going to be real mean to Lee Strobel for you.

But he seems like a pleasant man.

Right.

I don't know anything about him except this interview and you know what I've read and his book and stuff.

But like, he seems like a happy person.

He's all right.

He also seems probably worse than Tucker in some ways,

but politer.

I mean,

I suppose you don't, you know,

if you write write a book about how angels and demons are better than science, I don't think I can let you off the hook, even if you're a polite guy.

Wait to hear some of the shit he says.

I believe that.

I believe that hard.

So here's the thing you need to know about Lee before Tucker brings him in.

That is, you know, the most important thing is he likes to prove shit.

Right.

Because he's from journalism.

Oh, my God.

Well, Lee Strobel was a reporter.

He worked for the Chicago Tribune and left and became a pastor.

So he has a religious faith, but also a grounding in empiricism, the desire to prove things.

He is the perfect person to write the book that he did about the supernatural.

That would be dreams, mystical dreams, near-death experiences, miracles, ghosts.

We sat down with him to hear just how common these experiences are and what they mean.

I hate to say it, but the themes grown on me.

Real.

Tucker's theme song has grown on me.

That That little twang, yeah.

Well, it's fair.

So, this is already what he's, what Tucker is saying is already a huge problem for him because he's trying to prove that Lee Strobel likes to live in the world of proven facts by saying that he worked for a major newspaper.

Right.

The mainstream media is supposed to be all spin and lies, so the fact that he worked for the Chicago Tribune should probably be a mark against him in Tucker's world.

Yeah.

I guess the media is only the enemy of the people when you need it to be.

So, Lee did work in journalism, but he hasn't since 1987.

At that point, he became involved with megachurches in writing Christian apologetics texts designed to argue why it's not irrational to believe in various tenets of the religion.

There you go.

And I'm sure that most people know, but like apology in this case is not like, it's not like, I'm sorry.

No, no, no, no.

It's an argumentative.

It's a defense of

the physical.

Physiognomy makes sense.

Yeah.

I have no problem with him writing these kinds of texts, but it's deeply disingenuous to call him someone who's interested in empiricism.

In a religious sense, Lee is an evangel evangelist, and when religion and politics intersect, as they do with Tucker, he's acting as a propagandist.

I don't care about a person working at a newspaper almost 40 years ago, so the presentation of Lee as a rational actor based on that piece of his resume is not going to sway me.

We'll see how he makes his arguments and presents his information, and from there we can see if this is an honest empiricist who just has to admit that magic is real, or if he's a charlatan parading around in an empiricist costume, feeding into a religious hysteria that's going to be used to persecute a ton of people for no reason.

Sure.

We'll find out.

You know what?

I was just thinking.

I was just thinking.

Here's what I'm doing.

All right.

I'm creating a farm system for these guys.

This is my new plan.

I hire a bunch, or I like raise a bunch of youth group kids to think, you know, go become a journalist.

And then in eight years, you'll be the person.

I'm like, oh, come to the other side.

And you'll be like, I worked in journalism for eight years.

And now I believe in the Lord.

But actually you did it the whole time.

It was all a fucking ruse and now you're brought up to the big game.

Yeah.

That's what I'm saying.

I don't think this is a bad idea.

Well, I think that there is some kind of like,

what would Alex call that?

Like sheep dipping?

Sure.

Sheep dipping someone incredibility.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

That's the way to do it.

So Lee comes into

the interview.

Okay.

And

Lee Strobalth.

So you've written a book.

I don't do a lot of book interviews, but I couldn't resist this one.

Seeing the supernatural, supernatural investigating angels demons mystical dreams near-death encounters and other mysteries of the unseen world right

i think a lot of us sense or know on some level in fact i think everybody knows on some level um that there is a world that science can't measure or quantify yeah that there is um

You know, that there's stuff that we can't explain, but that it's no less real for our inability to explain it.

So

let's go through the list.

Yeah.

So the elephant in the room here is that Tucker has recently revealed that he was attacked by a demon in his sleep.

He did an interview with an orthodox documentarian about it, so it's not just a poorly kept secret or something that Alex has gossiped about without permission.

Tucker's trying to insinuate that we all know that there are unseen things in the world that science can't explain, but doesn't seem to want to tell Lee about his own very real and very serious experience.

Lee has written a book about encounters with angels and demons, so Tucker could he could be a very useful resource when he was writing this book or now he's promoting it should have been should have been consulted right Tucker has so much evidence like I'm sure he took pictures of the claw marks and his wife can verify aspects of the story so this seems like a perfect situation for him and Lee Lee's the person most motivated to believe Tucker's story yeah and Tucker is the person who seems like he could provide Lee with solid evidence of a demon attack chocolate and peanut butter baby i'm sure that we're going to spend a lot of time nailing down the specifics and you know tucker's testimony testimony.

It feels very real.

It's not going to come up at all.

You don't think so?

It doesn't come up.

It would be interesting to see them disagree, though.

That would be the joy.

I don't think Lee would disagree with him.

As a professional

former journalist who studies demons now, I can tell you that demon you are talking about was not real.

That claw is a dog size.

Yep, yep, yep, yep.

You say your dog sleeps in the bed with you?

Demons have much bigger claws.

It's like the guy in the, in the, who the Pope hires to be like, no, demons are real.

But then he finds one.

Yeah.

Yeah, we're going to talk about a guy like that later.

Yeah.

So Lee, he used to be an atheist.

Sure.

And he was trained in law.

You know, by the way,

I was an atheist.

I'm trained in journalism and law.

And so I'm always looking for corroboration.

I'm looking for evidence.

I'm looking for facts.

And so you're right.

I think there's an intuitive sense that most people have that there's something beyond what we can see touch or put in.

Eight out of ten Americans believe that.

So, law is not a science.

Law is another, it's a system of rules, which we like to imagine is based on empiricism, but it's actually more influenced by rhetoric.

Lawyers make arguments and courts decide cases, which isn't the same as consistently reproducible reactions caused by introducing two chemicals into the same space.

Journalism is also not a science.

All of these things, law, journalism, and science, deal with the concept of truth differently.

So, Lee boosting his credentials in law and journalism doesn't mean that he has any connection to the scientific method at all.

But Lee does have a master's in law from Yale, which makes sense because his career is about arguing.

It's not about proving, but instead about pretending that arguing is the same as proving.

And that's why he was, he had a role in God's Not Dead 2.

See, here's what's important.

I was trained in law and journalism.

Two things that everybody knows, like angels and demons, are the single most objective things that have been.

Nobody's ever seen a subjective court or a subjective piece of journalism.

That would be absurd.

Right.

Right.

So because of this expertise, I can now tell you that angels and demons are real.

And I went to Yale so you know the things I believe are good for you.

I hold you in contempt.

Couldn't think of another court term.

Judgment.

So look,

how do we know?

How do we know things?

How do we know anything?

How do we know things?

Right.

And when you think about how do we know things, how do we know things?

You start to realize that atheists are the fucking stupid ones.

How do we know?

What is the evidence?

And that's what I try to get into in the book.

How can we be sure through corroborated evidence that indeed there are such things as miracles, as near-death experiences, as deathbed encounters, and mystical dreams and things like that?

Yeah, atheism is the leap of imagination.

It is.

That's true.

It's hard to be an atheist.

It's very true.

I can admire them in a way, though.

Feel sorry for the best.

Anyway, okay.

Angels.

Yeah.

Angels.

Angels.

I think that in life, it's important to respect what is knowable and what is not, and to respect people's right to experience the stuff that's not, however, works best for them.

As it stands now, there's not a reliable, reproducible, meaningful way to prove the existence of a personified God.

So I think it's fair to count that as part of life that's unknowable for now.

Maybe one day we'll create some kind of Geiger counter that can sense angel particles, and then we can talk a bit more about the empirical empirical case for religion.

But for now, that's dumb.

That said, it's not necessarily dumb, in my opinion, to have faith and choose to believe what you want about unknowable things.

In the absence of demonstrable proof that God exists, it makes total sense to choose to believe in an all-loving figure who created us for a reason.

Why not?

Exactly.

Are you busy?

If it helps someone get through the day and find meaning, then it's probably a good thing, generally.

The only way that we can live in a balanced society is if we accept what is knowable, what is currently unknowable, and treat those things differently.

And I think we've lost track of that a little bit.

Are you trying to say that there's something subjective about the Bible?

I think you've missed the point.

Well, I think that there's a subjective and objective mix, and enjoy.

Tucker feels the need to deride atheists because he needs to obscure from the fact that he and hardcore atheists suffer from the same fallacy, which is pretending that they can prove something that's impossible to prove.

One side says they can prove God does exist, the other side says they can prove God doesn't, And neither can really accept that they're fundamentally operating from an arbitrary answer that they've come up to for an unanswerable question.

And their answer is acceptable.

It's just imposing it on everybody else is dumb.

Yep.

Yep.

So.

That is kind of the problem.

Yeah.

It's a little bit like, you know, if you think about what Jesus was saying about the hot or cold concept, if you're all the way in, right, you're going to treat people nice because you got to get into heaven.

That's the most important thing that you could possibly do, right?

But if you're all the way out, you got to treat people nice.

This is all you've got.

This is all you've got left.

You're going to die.

You're going to fucking die and then there'll be nothing.

So you got to treat people nice.

So that's what you thought the hot and cold was about?

It's all the stuff in the middle that's dumb.

But also, when something's in the middle, it doesn't burn your mouth or chip your tooth because it's frozen.

That's fine for all this stuff around here, but not for that guy upstairs.

That's fair enough.

Yep.

So

I wanted to stress that and kind kind of like touch on this a little bit because I don't want to be like, ah, fuck you, religion.

Like, I don't want to come off like that.

And I don't want to be like, ha ha, look at these stupid Christians that believe this dumb shit.

Sure.

These are specific people who believe some dumb shit.

And it's possible to maintain religion and faith in a way that isn't this.

And I just want to differentiate between that.

One of the most universal things that is true is that everybody believes in dumb shit somewhere.

Somewhere or another, you'll find some dumb shit you believe in.

Right.

And that's essentially the only way to deal with unanswerable questions other than just being like, oh.

Yeah.

There's an owl or believe in some dumb shit.

And they're both basically the same.

Yeah.

Well, one gives you things to do.

The other doesn't.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So anyway, angels.

True.

What do you know about angels?

Good ones or bad ones?

They play in Los Angeles.

Because we got the good ones with the wings upstairs, but then we got the bad ones with the wings downstairs because they were upstairs, but then they got into a big fight and then they went downstairs.

My man, they became demons, and we'll get to them later.

All right, fair enough.

Angels for now, or just the good guys?

Just the good side.

Okay.

So Lee explains what they're up to.

Okay.

Angels.

Yeah.

That's an angel.

Fascinating.

You know,

angels are created by God

before humankind was created.

They are spirit beings, so they're not omniscient like God is.

They're not omnipresent like God is.

They don't age because there's there's no physical body.

They don't marry because there's no physical body.

Must be nice.

They're very intelligent, very smart.

Obey laws.

With what?

According to God

to serve not only God, but also his people.

And what's interesting,

the Christian Bible with the Hebrew Old Testament

makes references.

Is there any culture in the world that doesn't believe in some form of angel?

It's pretty universal.

Pretty universal.

Sure.

So now we're supposed to believe that Lee is coming from a position of a guy who has Christian faith, but is also a man of empiricism.

So the things that he's saying aren't just wacky ramblings.

They're based in fact.

Absolutely.

If you want to say that you believe that angels exist because of some incident where someone is saved by an angel and there's no explanation that you can come up with for it, then I can accept that you're applying a critical mind to the situation.

Sure.

You're going off the rails and applying critical thinking poorly, but you're seeking an explanation for something that you feel cannot be explained any other way.

So you're left to assume, well, maybe it was an angel.

Sure.

Conversely, if you're telling me that angels were created before humans and you want to tell me about their biology and dating habits, then I'm no longer convinced that what you're saying is the product of critical thinking.

Hmm.

As we go along, this is one of the crucial things to keep in mind because it reveals the lie that all of this is based on.

Lee is pretending that he's a good faith researcher who has seen stuff that just can't be explained by natural means.

So he's left with no choice but to consider the possibility that maybe the supernatural stuff is going on.

Right.

But where in his exploration of trying to explain natural phenomena did he learn that angels don't get married?

No.

Well, because they can't fuck, right?

His argument is they don't marry because there's no physical body.

Right.

Right?

They don't age.

That's the concept, or they can't reproduce, or whatever it is you'd like to say.

They never have to buy new clothes.

Right, right, right.

Now, if I understand this correctly, though,

where do they smart?

Do you know what I mean?

If there's no physical body, what is it that they keep their smarts in?

You know, like we have a brain.

We're not just like thinky.

I think there's spatial intelligence people.

Is that how it works?

They just have existing space.

You know how like Turbo on the challenge is really good at like color puzzles.

That's true.

Like, he's just a machine at those things.

Yeah.

Angels are like that.

Okay.

That makes enough sense for me.

I'm in.

Oh boy.

So this guy, I mean, like, we're already

only a couple minutes into the interview, and like, you have abandoned the pretense of empiricism.

Tell me more about the marriage.

Tell me more about why they don't marry.

Tell me if God was like, we should get ones that marry and ones that don't marry.

What are we talking about here?

Well, they don't marry because they don't have hands and therefore no fingers, so they can't have rings.

They can't put the rings on the fingers.

The ring is an essential part of the union.

That makes sense.

You're not wrong.

and then how would they kiss the bride right they don't have a body no lips no lips yep so um you know who has lips

a kardashian no

so uh want to hear some let's hear some more about some angels all right like maybe how they save missionaries okay What's interesting about the Christian interpretation of angels is

in the book of Hebrews in the Bible that we should anticipate the possibility that we would encounter an angel.

In other words, it says sometimes when you're providing hospitality to someone, unbeknownst to you, it's an angel.

And so there's an anticipation that perhaps there could be angelic encounters.

And so what I try to look at in the book are cases in which we have angelic encounters.

People actually encounter an angel.

I'll give you an example.

There was a missionary named John G.

Payton, P-A-T-O-N, from Scotland.

And he went to an island in the South Pacific to be a Christian missionary.

And he and his wife are living in a cottage there, and he's talking about Jesus.

Well, the local tribespeople didn't quite like that.

And so one day, a mob of them came to burn down their house and kill him.

Sure.

So they see this mob forming, and he and his wife are in their house.

And what can they do?

They start to pray.

It's like, God, protect us, help us.

They're going to kill us.

They're going to burn our house down.

What do we do?

And they prayed all night long.

And by dawn, the mob began to dissipate.

A year later, he led the head of that mob to faith in Jesus Christ.

Oh, my God.

And they're having a conversation.

And John said to him, by the way, do you remember that day when you all came to burn down our house and kill us?

Why didn't you do it?

And the man said, well, who are all those men you had there?

He said, I don't know, men.

It was just my wife and I.

Your house was surrounded by these muscular men in white garments with drawn swords.

There's no way we could have hurt you that night.

Injected in my veins.

Well, what's the explanation for that?

I think it could very well have been an angelic encounter, that God had sent angels to protect him.

It only makes sense.

That's the only thing I can think of.

That's the only explanation I can think of.

I think you and I are both having like flashbacks to bullshit stories people told us when we were in youth groups.

So many of these.

And it's always, it's always the, and then they prayed all night.

It's all night.

It's never they prayed for a couple hours.

It's never they prayed for two nights.

It's always the whole night.

God needs the full eight hours, man.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

And if you clock out early, the mob's coming in.

Absolutely.

You're done.

Yeah.

When Lee asks, what's the explanation here?

It's key to remember that he's not really asking a question.

He's arguing that angels were protecting this guy's house, and there's no other possible explanation that we can come up with.

This is a cute anecdote, and I remember hearing shit like this all the time in Youth Group because these are stories meant to appease the audience of the faithful.

This is the type of content you throw out to literally preach to the choir because no one else is going to be persuaded by this at all.

For one thing, this is a third-hand story at best.

The mob leader is telling the missionary about something he allegedly saw, then the missionary is retelling the story, and Lee is retelling hearing about the missionary's story.

Right.

This game of telephone doesn't inspire confidence.

Further, you notice that Lee knows the missionary's name, but not the guy who saw the angels.

Yep.

That's suspicious.

So Lee uses this anecdote in his book to argue for the existence of angels, but he doesn't use the testimony of the guy who saw the angels or even the missionary, John Gilbert Patton.

He cites Billy Graham discussing Patton's story, which is another layer of interpretation which is being added to this whole thing.

Including Billy Graham, which increases the likelihood of truth.

Yeah.

Billy Graham used this story in his 1975 book, Angels, God's Secret Agents.

Lee is just taking Graham's version of the whole thing, which isn't very inquisitive of him and makes me think that he doesn't care for empiricism.

This is because John Gilbert Patton wrote an autobiography that was published in 1889.

And this story is in there.

You are going to get the account of the random mob leader who supposedly saw angels, but Patton's story is closer to the event than Graham's retelling of it.

So Lee should have consulted that for his book as opposed to Billy Graham's

version of the story.

You'd think.

Because if he had done that, he would find that Graham is mistelling the story and there's no angels in it.

Oh, what?

What?

So to set the scene,

Patton and his associates were setting up a mission in the New Hebrides.

There's some islands in the vicinity of Australia.

For the most part, the native population accepted merchants and missionaries, but there had been a flare-up recently due to a quarrel between sandalwood merchants and some locals.

That'll happen.

This led to some murders.

Hey, what are you going to do?

In the aftermath of that, it looked like a full-on war was going to break out, but tensions lowered.

All the same, Patton's mission wasn't viewed the same after that, and a lot of people on the island viewed him as the enemy.

Sure.

A while after that, a chief from another island came to visit and died shortly after returning home.

That's no good.

Some people, quote, hearing of his death, ascribed it to me and the worship and resolved to burn our house and property and either murder the whole mission party or compel us to leave the island.

I mean, it does make sense.

Well, there's at least like a little bit more of an A to B.

Exactly.

You know, it's like, I'm sure you could believe in angels.

I believe that this happened.

We just move on.

That's how it works.

So at this point, Patton had some allies among the native population, like a chief named Nawat, who spoke in Patton's defense and tried to get them, hey, don't burn down his mind.

Hey, come on, this guy's just one of, he's just a guy.

Yeah, but it wasn't enough.

Quote, the inhabitants from miles around united in seeking our destruction, but God put to it even savage hearts to save us.

A meeting of all our enemies on the island was summoned, and it was publicly resolved that a band of men be selected and enjoined to kill the whole of those friendly to the mission.

Frenzy and excitement prevailed, and the blood fiend seemed to override the whole assembly, when, under the impulse that surely came from the Lord of Pity, one great warrior chief who had hitherto kept silent rose, swung aloft a mighty club, and smashed it earthwards, cried aloud, The man who kills Misi must kill me first.

The men that kill the mission teachers must kill me first and my people, for we shall stand by them and defend them till death.

Sure.

So the guy who stands up for them ends up getting like a slow clap of the chiefs.

Right.

Who are all like, we got his back.

Right, right, right.

We got the missionaries back, and then the mission's saved.

Right.

And I,

so let me follow this evolution, if you will.

So in this real story, well, as real as we're going to get out of this.

I mean, it's a late 1800s autobiography by a missionary who seems to think that he's part adventurer, which is kind of a fun tone.

Right.

He also doesn't seem to hate native populations, but also kind of hates them.

I mean, you know, what are you going to do?

Yeah.

But the point being, the native population is all doing what they do, and the hero of the story is one of those people.

Right.

And obviously, you're going to say he's moved by the Lord of Pity.

You know,

God moved his heart to protect them.

But it is out of the goodness of these chiefs

standing up for them and protecting them that they didn't have their mission burned.

So then, notoriously,

white supremacist Christian Billy Graham gets a hold of this story, and those men are no longer native, but in fact white-robed white people holding swords.

Muscular.

That's crazy.

That is just crazy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So in his story, Patton says, quote, clearly did our Lord Jesus Christ interpose directly on our behalf that day.

I and my defenseless company had spent it in anxious prayers and tears, and our hearts overflowed with gratitude to the savior who rescued us from the lion's jaws.

So when Lee tells the story and asks, what's the explanation, I find his disposition to be dishonest.

The explanation is obvious.

A missionary who died in 1907 wrote an autobiography that at times reads like a tintin.

And then a craven evangelist came along and embellished the story for his own book about angels being secret agents for God.

Explain that with your science!

Lee isn't interested in digging down to uncover truth.

He's just financially invested in perpetuating the same shit Billy Graham was pursuing.

Yep.

And,

man,

I might read the rest of that guy's autobiography.

I mean, that sounds fun.

Yeah.

Those old-timey adventure stories are truly great, and a lot of them have some truth to them.

Yeah, and he seemed like an unreliable narrator, but like in a fun way.

Yeah, they're all really unreliable narrators because they're just white people having a grand time in the late 19th century.

Yeah.

What are you going to do?

It's long enough ago that I think I can chuckle.

Yeah.

You can't do anything about it now.

Yeah.

Let's just face it.

There's no, there's no going back now.

So I think that this story sucks.

And Lee's argument for angels still at zero.

Sure.

But Tucker is like, fuck yeah.

Give me another one.

All right.

And there's multiple numbers of cases like that.

Give me another.

Well, I had an encounter myself when I was 12 years old.

It was the only dream I remember as a child.

It was more of a vision than a dream.

An angel appeared to me and started extolling heaven, how beautiful and wonderful heaven is.

And I looked at him kind of offhandedly and said, well, you know, I'm going to go there someday.

And he looked at me and said, how do you know?

Oh.

And I was shocked by that.

What do you mean, how do I know?

And I started to kind of stumble around to justify my goodness.

I said, well, I obey my parents pretty much, and I get good grades in school, and my friends liked me, and I'm trying to justify why I would get into heaven.

And he looked at me and he said, that doesn't matter.

And this chill went through my spine.

How can this not matter?

And he said, someday you'll understand.

And then he disappeared.

Well, I kind of wrote it off as being a bad pizza and ultimately became an atheist.

But 16 years later, as an atheist, my wife brought me to a church and I heard the gospel for the first time.

That salvation, that the doors of heaven are not flung open based on how nice you are to your parents or

how good grades you get in school.

It's based on the grace of God.

It's not something we earn.

It's a free gift of God's grace.

And I heard that message for the first time, and my mind flashed back to that dream.

And I thought, wait a minute.

That's what he was trying to tell me back then.

Have you thought a lot about that dream in the subsequent dream?

It would come to me every once in a while.

I'd think about it.

I'd just suppress it.

It was a bad pizza, you know.

But then I thought there's two forms of corroboration there.

Number one, that angel told me something when I was 12 years old that I did not already know.

Fair.

That salvation is by grace.

I'll count that.

He made a prophecy, a prediction that someday I would understand that came true 16 years later.

Boom.

I think that may have been an angelic encounter that I had.

I can't prove it.

But that corroboration tells me maybe it really was.

I'm sorry, but I don't care about this dream at all.

And I have to insist that it doesn't prove anything.

If Lee wants to take some personal meaning from it, and if that's important to him, then I don't want to insult that or take that away from him.

But pretending it's anything more than that is idiotic.

The fact that this is the second example he has when trying to argue for the existence of angels is a bad sign.

Yeah.

It should be a strong indication that his argument is some weak shit.

You know, here's what I'm thinking.

Where I'm coming from right here

is if you do the

hard numbers, the hard economics, right?

I think in October there's well over 100 new sci-fi fantasy books coming out.

And of those,

less than 100 are going to make, are going to sell more than like 2,000 copies.

That's just the truth of the market.

That's just how it works.

But boy, buddy, Christian bookstores.

Especially Christian apologetics texts from big name people who are like established in the field.

Lie off the shelves.

Well, and probably subsidized by bulk purchases from churches.

You better believe it.

There's all kinds of things.

You better believe it.

It's definitely...

a cooler business to be in than sci-fi.

Yeah, that's the way.

That's the way to go because it's very similar,

but one is more lucrative.

I also have a working theory that Lee wrote this almost the same book about five years ago.

He's just doing it again.

That probably sounds right.

Anyway, we'll get to that later.

But I could nitpick around and say that he he could have been more aware of Christianity as a child than he's letting on, or that he probably rewrote this memory of the dream in his head a thousand times.

But I don't want to do that because I don't care.

I will not argue against the meaning that Lee personally has for this dream because that's for him to decide.

I will just flatly say that dream-based evidence is not evidence.

So no matter how convincing this story is or isn't, it means nothing in our search for angels.

If you're accepting angels visiting you in a dream and telling you riddles as a form of evidence, you're not interested in evidence.

This is bad.

You know, I love these stories because of the way they're told in different places.

This story told in the church group is very

god-heavy.

This story told in like a dinner party, far less god-heavy.

More of just like, you know what?

Here's an interesting thing that might have happened to me.

Tucker right in the middle.

Exactly.

I think.

Yep.

Yep.

Probably a little closer to church than dinner.

I would say we're probably more in a we can speak freely zone than elsewhere.

If that's where we're.

I mean, Tucker's been bit by a demon.

Yeah, but he, but weirdly, Tucker can't speak freely because he's not bringing up the fact that he got attacked by a demon guy.

It is really weird that you've got a demon guy and you're not talking about being attacked by a demon.

It's literally all I was thinking about while I was watching it.

The whole time.

Yeah.

Crazy.

So look.

Angels exist.

Sure.

We've established this.

Yes.

Should you pray to angels?

No.

You and Lee are in agreement about this.

But there's nuance.

No.

But the other thing I learned in my investigation of angels, I thought, you know what?

I don't think it's appropriate to pray to angels.

I don't believe we're taught to do that.

I think there's a slippery slope if you pray to angels that it might slip into worship of angels, which would be blasphemous.

But there's nothing wrong with praying to God about angels.

Martin Luther in the small catechism has a prayer, an evening prayer that says, Lord, send your holy angels to protect me from the evil one.

And so I never used to do this, but I now make part of my prayer that God would send angels to protect me and my family, my ministry, my grandchildren, and so.

I think that's totally appropriate to do.

Hate to brag, but we're pretty confident this show is the most vehemently pro-dog podcast you're ever going to see.

Okay.

Jarring.

Talking about whether you can pray about angels and Tucker comes in with his love of dogs.

You want to know what that ad is for?

What?

Dog telemedicine.

That's not good.

Do you want to have a webcam thing?

I really don't.

I really don't.

You know, I was just thinking that

Jesus was just so mean to those moneylenders.

You know, like, that's a real dick move.

They didn't deserve that kind of treatment.

They need to be more accepting of pro-dog podcasts.

That's what's important here.

So, you're talking about, you know, Jesus and the money changers and stuff.

Who do you think that Tucker will later compare to the modern day

people that Jesus would throw out with whips?

You know, I bet it's not moneylenders.

It's not.

Yeah.

Probably Antifa?

LGBTQ4.

Here we go, baby.

Hit it!

So

when I think about why I believe in something,

generally I'm like, people did in the past, so I should too.

Is that how that works?

For Tucker, it is.

Interesting.

Are you aware of any society in the known history of the human race that didn't believe that there was a supernatural realm filled with good and evil?

Yes, it's virtually universal.

I've never heard of any culture that didn't believe that except post-war West.

Yeah.

Drop the atom bomb, get rid of the supernatural.

Right.

Because we're God now.

Yeah, that's right.

But before then, I mean, I just think this was taken as a matter of course, right?

Of course, yeah, naturally.

So if every society in known history reaches the same, a version of the same conclusion,

it suggests maybe there's something there.

It sure does.

It sure does.

Why would you come up with it?

Exactly.

You know, it's funny.

So Tucker's not this stupid, and him making an argument like this is a weaponized attack directed at the audience yeah the argument is supposed to be that in the past everyone believed in a demonic and angelic supernatural realm so we should too sure it was pretty universally believed that the sun was god and the earth was flat so why should we reject those widely held beliefs just because we're so cool and modern now yeah like this is dumb Fucking kids with their TikTok.

Explain that with your science.

Mm-hmm.

When Tucker's laughing, making that argument, I think he's laughing at the people who believe that he's making a real point.

Like, there's a part of me that feels like there's a disdain for, like, this is so easy.

That is a ridiculous thing to say, especially because we all know that there is a society that lives beneath the ground that worships an unexploded nuclear bomb.

And that movie was in the past, so it was in the past, right?

Now, I know it was said in the future, but it was in the past.

It's also part of lost.

Sure.

There's definitely that.

Absolutely.

And there's also past and future and lost.

What are we doing?

I don't know.

Every society's always believed in that, dumb, dumb.

What are we doing?

What are we talking about?

I think that you and I are both kind of a little bit short-circuity because it's almost a non-sequitur.

It doesn't mean anything.

It's crazy to use that as a thing to say.

Yeah.

I think that

what Lee is coming in with is a bit of a swing.

Yeah.

And,

you know, they say that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Sure.

He says nah.

Ah.

Interesting.

People will say, well, you need extraordinary evidence to prove an extraordinary claim,

which I don't think is legitimate.

I don't think that stands up to scrutiny.

But let's take it for a moment on face value and say you need extraordinary evidence to prove an extraordinary claim.

Well, the claim that there are demons is not an extraordinary claim.

It's interesting.

Because 95% of humanity through history has believed in it.

So if you're an atheist,

the onus is on you.

You must present the extraordinary evidence that the demonic does not exist.

No, I don't.

When people say that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, they just mean that if you're making a claim that flies in the face of existing evidence, your evidence needs to be more compelling than the existing evidence that says you're wrong.

The burden of proof falls upon a person who makes an affirmative claim because trying to do things the other way is impossible.

For example, in this case, I can't satisfactorily prove to you that demons don't exist in the same way that I can't prove that any fake thing doesn't exist.

You can't prove a negative, which is why you can't put the burden of proof onto a position that requires you to do that in order to establish their position.

When people argue against vaccines, it's not fair to demand that they prove that vaccines don't work, because that would be impossible for them to do.

What's expected of them is to critically attack the existing evidence that argues that vaccines do work.

Vaccines do work is an affirmative position that people can prove by providing

supporting evidence, and then people who want to be contrarian try to poke holes in that evidence.

This is how this works.

The game.

Lee is telling me that demons exist, so he's on the fucking clock.

I'm not interested in disproving the existence of demons, so the only thing that's going to happen here is he can present information that I'll respond to, or we can go home.

He can just pretend that his belief in demons is the default position and I'm somehow out of step with history because I don't share it.

But my little secret is that I don't give a fuck.

I don't care about how he feels about this.

Yeah.

I will prove it by living my entire life, never having an encounter to a demon and then dying, and then neither of us will care.

Proof.

Ta-da.

Done.

So this next clip, I think, is

revealing

about

Tucker's psychology.

And I think this scared me a little.

Well, there are also moments in the life of every person who's awake and not on fentanyl, maybe even people who are on fentanyl, I hope,

where you know that you are being acted on by an outside force of some kind.

You have no idea what it is.

But there are moments when you are much better than yourself, much more empathetic.

And there are other moments where you're seized by the desire to destroy for the sake of destruction, which also doesn't make any sense.

There's no kind of evolutionary biological accounting for that.

Why would you want to force me for no reason?

Another person, an object, but the impulse to destroy

clearly the hallmark of evil, right?

It is, and it's consistent with the Christian teaching that the demonic realm exists, that it is intent on luring us away from him.

I don't know if the desire to destroy for the sake of destruction is like a universal thing, or if Tucker just thinks it is.

Because I think it's probably more a piece of his out-of-control anger that he feels all the time.

Sure.

Instead of dealing with the causes of that anger and letting go of his bullshit, I guess he's just decided to pretend that he's plagued by demons who control his impulses and behavior.

Because I don't relate to that.

I don't relate to the desire to destroy just for the sake of destruction.

I would say that in general,

this type of thinking comes from people who are terrified of taking responsibility for their own behavior

generally because their father's period.

We're in the CIA.

Something along those lines.

I just find it unrelatable, and it feels more like a glimpse into Tucker's mind than anything else.

Yeah.

I think

it feels excusey.

You know,

what I've experienced with that specific, that kind of like destruction for destruction's sake, is that is somebody who thinks it is better.

Morally or philosophically to destroy something for destruction's sake than for the reason that they are actually doing it.

Hmm.

That is usually like, oh, it's just destruction for destruction's sake, as opposed to, I want to obtain something and I am going to destroy this to get it.

Yeah, I can see that.

And I think that that falls under the headline or the heading that I had of excusing it.

Yeah, yeah.

It's rationalizing what is a different impulse.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we've already heard a couple of dumb stories about people being saved by angels that don't seem convincing.

Not very convincing.

How about another one, though?

Is it white people?

No.

Maybe the guy in a car.

Excellent.

So you said that angels in the New Testament and perhaps also in the old, but

angels are described as present in our world.

Yes.

We will mistake angels for people.

Very well.

That's right.

That's predicted.

So do you think that happens?

Yes.

And if so, can you give us an example?

And what would be the purpose of that?

Yeah, you know, it's interesting.

In the book of Hebrews, it says that we will do it unbeknownst to ourselves.

So in other words, the implication is that we will have angelic encounters, but we won't realize they're angels.

And I think that does happen.

Now, I have a couple of cases in my book.

One is a pastor who is driving his car in Ohio.

He loses control of the car.

He hits a telephone or an electric transformer kind of a...

pole type of thing.

The wires fall down on his car.

The doors are jammed shut.

The electricity is coursing through the car, so much so that the windshield starts to melt.

And he's trapped in this car.

He doesn't know what to do.

And he begins to pray.

God,

I'm stuck.

I don't know what to do.

And a man, scruffy kind of guy, comes walking up to the car.

And he opens the car whose doors were jammed.

He opens the door.

He reaches in.

He lifts out this pastor and takes him about 50 yards away from the car,

which then explodes.

And he says to the pastor, he says, you're going to be okay.

You're okay now.

But the police are on their way, and I can't be here when they get here.

So

just know that you're okay.

And he walked away and disappeared.

Now, the people, the medics who came, the emergency technicians and so forth that came as a result of the accident, and they look at the car and say,

they can't explain how this is possible that somebody could have opened that car door and not been electrocuted and rescued this pastor.

And yet it happened.

And the pastor says, I believe it was an angel.

Well, maybe.

Could have been.

How do you prove something like that?

But I mean, how do you explain it away naturally?

Just because you don't have a ready natural explanation for how something happened, that doesn't mean that you have to give credibility to a supernatural explanation.

This is a dumb leap that he's making.

Yeah.

So, go for it.

Go ahead.

Oh, no, I just finished, I just read this book, Ghosts of Hiroshima, which is another, I think it's pretty new.

But it tells a bunch of these stories of

the survivors of people who were in Hiroshima when the nuclear bomb landed and exploded.

And there's just these blast zones, and it's a reproducible phenomenon in all of these types of things.

They're just these random spots where this person will be telling you a story about how they were having a day, and then the entire universe around them was gone and they were fine.

Right.

Now, if that person genuinely wanted to be like, there's an angel, I'd be like, man, if anybody was ever getting an angel and I was going to take it, that'd be fine.

And they were like, isn't that crazy?

This coincidence that happened?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think that this might fall under some of that heading.

Oh, yeah.

Or some of that heading.

Yeah.

Lee is supposed to be a guy who likes empirical evidence and he proves things.

He worked in a paper.

But in this story, there's no evidence of anything.

There's a story that a pastor told after he was in a car accident.

Outside of this one person who was probably in shock after the crash, no one saw this other character in the story.

This scruffy stranger may not exist.

It was Bagger Vance, actually.

It could have been.

It could have been.

While it is true and confirmed by emergency responders that an electric transformer did fall on this guy, John Boston's car, and that electricity was surging through the car when they arrived on the scene, we don't know if the the door was actually jammed.

It might have seemed like the door was jammed initially after the crash, but then he was able to get it open on a second or third try.

Who knows?

There's a lot of possibilities that aren't even involving malice or lying.

No.

There could just be the way your brain incorporates information.

Absolutely.

So Boston claims that his seatbelt was stuck and that this scruffy guy named Johnny

got him out of the car, but he doesn't know if he cut the seatbelt.

The car ended up pretty badly burned, so I'm not sure there's any way anyone would be able to tell that one way or the other.

So, Boston's family was doing a vlog on YouTube around the time of this accident, so they ended up recording a fair amount of him in the hospital right afterwards.

It's notable that in that video, he doesn't seem to know what year it is.

He thinks that it's July when it's actually April, and he appears to be on some painkillers.

At one point later in the vlog, his wife says, Quote, okay, he's coming too.

He knows I'm recording now.

Basically, everything about this story that makes it seem like maybe an angel was involved comes from one single person.

So it's pretty easy for me to reject this as a solid piece of evidence of angelic intervention.

Looking at the verifiable information about this incident, you can definitely say that this dude is lucky.

But jumping to it was an angel is something you would only do if you were desperate to back up your belief in angels.

Yeah.

Because otherwise, it's just

who's

this guy told the story.

There's,

I guess I get it.

I kind of don't.

I really don't get angels.

Of all the ones that there are, I just don't get angels.

I don't get that concept.

I don't get the idea of like, oh, somebody's always watching over you.

I don't...

Get away from me, man.

Get away from me.

Don't you have somewhere to be?

I think as you get older, you might warm up to angels.

You think so?

Yeah.

I think demons are young for the young.

Angels for the old.

Right.

Demons are cool hanging out, doing the sexes.

Running away from them.

Absolutely.

Totally going to fight, maybe?

Totally.

Maybe you're scared.

Right.

And angels, you're really hoping somebody will give you a ride.

Yeah.

Company.

Yeah.

You're sitting around the house.

Use an angel.

So

we now have to get off the subject of angels.

Sure.

Because it's time for the dark.

It's demon time.

It's time for a demon feast.

What are demons?

Demons are fallen angels.

The Bible is a little bit vague on this, but apparently what happened here, there was a...

It's kind of funny if I could just pause.

This is my totally ignorant read of it.

Yeah.

But when the supernatural host,

all these supernatural beings are referred to in the Bible, there's almost a sense in which

the writer is assuming the reader already knows all this.

Yes, that's right.

It doesn't have a passage that says, by the way,

these things are real.

Yeah, let me explain all this to you.

It doesn't do that, which is interesting.

But

the culture at the time was familiar with this, and there was kind of no debate that there was a supernatural.

It's sort of like the soul.

I have a chapter in the book on the existence of the soul.

And because a lot of scientists today will deny that the soul exists.

The Bible doesn't say, by the way, you have a soul, and here's, let me define it for you.

It presumes that we have a soul.

Scientists will deny the soul exists.

So most of what the big health companies sell is loaded with sugar and fillers and synthetic junk.

It's probably not too good for you.

And that's why we're interested in a company called Peak.

It's a modern wellness brand that is actually healthy.

It's good for your soul, which does exist.

And scientists will tell you it doesn't.

Scientists will tell you the soul doesn't exist?

Prove that with your science.

And my science will tell you that this supplement that I'm selling for be good for your demons.

It'll keep demons at bay.

Science-backed science.

Old literature often is reflective of the cultural milieu in which it was written, and it doesn't take the time to explain why certain things are the way they are.

A lot of early American literature takes it as understood that slavery is a natural thing and that there's a racial hierarchy.

That doesn't mean that those things are correct.

It just means at the time, a writer didn't feel the need to justify everything that they knew that their readers would understand.

This doesn't prove that demons or souls are real.

It just means that it was a part of the culture at the time.

It proves that it was a thing then.

Yep.

Great.

We already knew that because

there.

I love whatever.

It's just something like, isn't this really interesting?

It sounds like it was almost written by some asshole.

Just some regular asshole guy who was like, hey, how about I add this?

Not some sort of guided immortal force.

Just some asshole.

Yeah, it sounds human and of the time.

Yeah, weird.

Yeah.

So do you believe in in a soul?

I mean,

where?

Where am I keeping it?

What?

Where am I keeping the soul?

Somewhere in.

Okay.

Well, then.

Somewhere in here?

All right.

I mean, sure.

I can't imagine it's lower than the chest, right?

Doesn't that feel right?

Well, the gut, maybe.

You know, some people.

People do say, I mean, where would it, is it, is it like, that's what the spleen is for?

The souline.

I think we can definitely agree it's not in the legs.

Yeah, definitely not in in the legs.

Left leg, especially.

That femur is not holding the soul.

Sinister left.

That's what we're talking about.

Anyway, if you don't believe you have a soul, you're probably going to genocide people.

That sounds true.

Life.com.

Highly recommend it.

By the way, anyone who denies the soul exists, probably getting ready to genocide you.

It's like kind of a soulless experience.

Well, if there's no human soul, then how is murder wrong?

Well, exactly.

And they'll say free will is impossible.

So there's no free will.

Yeah, it's it's crazy.

It's crazy.

But demons,

I started out with Lucifer.

Yeah, that's a good place to start.

You're going to talk demons.

Let's start with Lucifer.

Sounds right.

So I think a lot of the people who have committed genocides historically have been people who have religious convictions and probably affirm the existence of a soul.

What?

Kind of a problem for Tucker's argument.

I'll be straight up.

I don't think I believe in souls, but that ambivalence doesn't affect my belief that murder is wrong.

You can justify that position a lot of ways that don't involve souls, like that it's just wrong to take away another person's subjective experience of life or that taking life is a transgression against the community that can't be tolerated.

Sure.

There's a bunch of paths.

Whatever you like.

If you incorporate an idea of a soul into your morality, that's great.

It can add color and texture to your beliefs and make living a little bit more fun.

Sure.

I have no problem with that.

On the flip side, if you need the idea of a soul to create a functioning morality, you're a baby and you should not be taken seriously in public discourse.

Yeah, it's not going to go well.

Oh, you need a soul.

It's such a strange argument to make.

Like, if there's no soul, then why is murder wrong?

When

it feels like it's the opposite.

Like murder, if you have a soul, it's going to keep going.

Murder's not even really a thing.

It is only the cessation of your physical body.

If you don't have a soul, you're actually murdering somebody.

You're killing them.

That's an interesting point.

I doubt he's thought about it.

No.

And Lee certainly doesn't bring it up.

No, I would strongly doubt that.

In fairness to Lee, it's because there's more important shit going on.

That's probably true.

Like Lucifer.

That is definitely true.

We got to talk about the big guy.

How's he doing?

He's, oof, man, he's a bummer.

I started out with Lucifer, whose name means morning star.

And he was kind of first among angels.

Name means morning star?

Yeah, Lucifer.

What are we doing?

What is this?

Satan, which, and the name Satan literally means adversary.

And so the implication in scripture is that this very prominent angel named Lucifer wanted to be worshipped.

He's the one who wanted the worship.

And so his pride is what resulted in him falling from the angelic realm, becoming Satan, becoming someone.

I mean, think about this.

When Jesus encounters Satan, what is it Satan wanted from him?

Worship.

Satan wanted Jesus to worship him.

And that's what Lucifer wanted.

It was pride that got in the way.

He becomes Satan.

And a certain percentage of the angels accompanied him in this fall.

This happened before the fall of humankind in the Garden of Eden.

So like 8%?

40%?

I don't know how many angels accompany him, but there are a lot of angels.

Seems important.

In Revelation chapter 5, there's a scene of Jesus on the throne being worshipped.

And if you do the math, because it...

talks about it a little cryptically.

It was 100 million angels worshiping him at that time.

So, at that time, angels.

That's a lot of angels.

At that time, though,

we don't know what their reproduction rates are because

they have bodies.

Right.

So, how many are there now?

I guess God could make more, but they don't reproduce because they have no bodies and don't marry.

What are you doing with those hundred million?

What are you doing with all those angels?

Where are they going?

What do they do?

What do they have to do?

Wreck sports?

That does make sense.

That does make sense.

Yeah.

Start a little soccer league.

All of these outfields need an angel, goddammit.

Right.

Inspiring children to do their best.

That's fair.

That actually would be a pretty solid use of angels.

So I got to say, this is grounded and verifiable stuff.

Yep.

And I'm glad that Lee is staying in this empiricism pocket.

Yeah.

Sky loves to prove things, and I tip my cap.

His history as a journalist and his study of law has really informed this knowledge that there are a hundred million angels.

That's cryptic.

A rough percentage of them did fall to where?

Don't know.

Again, they don't have bodies.

Well, the hundred million is cryptic, too.

That is cryptic.

In the Bible, in Revelation 5, it says, quote, then I looked and heard the voice of many angels numbering thousands upon thousands and ten thousand times ten thousand.

All right.

Is that cryptic?

Thousands upon thousands and ten thousand times ten thousand is not a number.

No.

10,000 times 10,000 is 100 million.

That is a number.

So is that cryptic?

I don't know.

Is that exact?

I don't know.

Who's keeping, who's counting?

Is there a guy at the door with a clicker?

One in, one, out.

Absolutely.

It has to be one in, one, out.

Otherwise, you can't keep track.

All right.

I do like the round number, too.

It is nice of God to be nice.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Also, I love Tucker's fucking specialty, the hot pitch.

That, like, you responded to that.

That, like,

what?

the face that he does and the fake sort of like oh my god, that's so interesting when he says that Satan Lucifer's name means morning star.

Fuck you.

Fuck you.

You got attacked by a demon, you dip shit.

No world is this news to you, you dumb fuck.

Fuck you.

But that's what he does like nobody else.

Yeah.

That what?

And he's just got that sense of believability for a guy like this who's like, see, he's getting it.

He's got such a punchably stupid face and like he commits.

Yep.

He doesn't care that it's very transparent.

And, you know, that's kind of fun.

He's got a power to him.

So you scared?

You scared of Lucifer?

Not particularly.

I feel like he's probably bored by now.

No.

Really?

He's fucking busy.

Okay.

All right.

He's so busy.

I mean, you got to stay busy in retirement.

I mean, it makes sense.

I don't know if he's retired.

It seems to me from listening to this that, like, he's got to be running all over the place.

He's not omniscient like God is.

He's not omnipresent like God is.

In other words, the guy was telling me, he said, there's probably never a time when you and Satan have both been in the same zip code

because he's only in one place at a time.

And so he's got things he's doing.

He's probably never been in the same zip code you have.

But

his demons probably have been.

And they carry out his will, which is to pull people away from God, to

discourage people in finding God, and to drag as many people to hell with him as they can.

Now, his

existence, he's sort of on a leash by God at this point.

His ultimate destination in the lake of fire is already predicted, so he has no future really, but he has influence and he has certain powers.

And

he and the demons are very intuitive.

You'll think they know more than they know, and they go after people.

This sucks.

I hate this kind of shit where the devil is the CEO of Evil Incorporated, and you've just dealt with middle managers all your life.

Jesus Christ.

Like, Satan is so busy, and he can only be in one place at one time.

So, like, where is he?

Why?

What are the powers?

I want an exact accounting for his powers.

How does he travel?

Right?

What are we talking about?

What is he busy with?

What is he?

What is he busy?

Wait, what zip code is he in?

Why is he in any zip codes?

In what possible facet could he need to exist within a place?

Let me ask you another question.

Yes.

Because he would be in a zip code.

Right.

That implies there's a physical form.

Physical form.

How big is he?

Exactly.

Can he be all-encompassing?

Is he Godzilla-size?

Okay, now imagine this.

Sure, he's not omnipresent, but is he, can he be any size?

Can he be the size of a planet?

Ant-Man style.

Right, exactly.

Are we varying in size?

What is our power set?

I want to know whether or not he could defeat Batman.

Well, so far,

he pretends to know more than he does.

I love the way I'm supposed to be afraid of Satan and his demons, and yet everything that he says makes him sound stupid.

I'm just picturing like a John Edward psychic type who's like,

I see somebody with the letter M in the audience.

Interesting.

Somebody who's pretending to know more than they actually do, but who's also late and needs to get somewhere.

That's not a devil I'm super freaked out about.

And just that lovely part of like, well, and God's got him on a leash for right now, which is like,

really?

So then everything is his fault.

Again, everything that you're ascribing to Satan,

if somebody's got a dog on a leash, that person is responsible for what the dog does.

No, no, no, because the dog has demons.

The dog's demons aren't on a leash.

They can be anywhere.

You can't leash something and also not be responsible for what that thing on your leash does.

Also, I would suggest that we have a finite number of demons.

Interesting.

I mean, he said a percentage of the angels left and became demons.

That's right.

And there can only be 100 million possible demons.

Theoretically, based on 100%.

10,000 by 10,000.

Yeah.

That's cryptic.

Yeah.

But, like, there's a finite number.

So humanity should get it together and start fucking hunting these demons.

Yeah, I think we could take them out.

Yes.

We could, but.

There's 8 billion of us.

But what would we do?

What would we hit them with?

There's no physical.

Or do they get physical bodies?

You just have to yell Jesus at them.

Oh, that sucks.

Right?

I mean, like,

this is a bad war.

Exorcists are effective.

Yeah, that's true.

They have to be.

They're in their world.

So, like, I think

we could take care of this demon thing.

I, you know what?

This is how I feel about vaccines.

You know what I'm saying?

Like, once we found out we could get rid of a disease, we should have had a task force that's like, now we're hunting every one of these fuckers down.

You know, to the extent that we can do that without creating more really dangerous things.

There needs to be smart people in charge of it, but you know, the concept.

You know, like, we're going after you.

We're going to win this one.

Yeah.

There's no reason the polio should exist.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

So, yeah.

demons could, it's a solvable problem.

We could handle this.

Right.

And then that raises the question if Satan can create more demons.

Or does he have to try and convince them?

Or, oh, yeah, like try and recruit some men

of the pool that are still left.

Right.

Or can he promote?

Can he turn you into?

Okay, okay.

So he's grabbing us

blood in, blood out.

A demon gets their ass kicked by a guy, but then boom, we show up.

Now you're demon number 45942 and maybe you're not great i mean you've never practiced being a demon before it's mostly just pretending you know more than you do

and date and i guess giving people what they want

yeah

all right So we got to get a, we get to get into a little exorcism talk

now.

So we find out about a guy, a psychiatrist named Richard gallagher okay i tell the story in my in my book about a very prominent psychiatrist uh named richard gallagher educated ivy league university um i have a quote from the former president of the american psychiatric association calling him um highest integrity um um um totally um trained and and prominent in his field of psychiatry of course he's a medical doctor because he's a psychiatrist um just extolling him as an individual and as a scientist, as a psychologist, a psychiatrist.

And about 25 years ago, he had two cats and they got along great.

They slept together, they played together, everything was fine.

Until one night, the cats started to attack each other viciously.

I mean, they're trying to kill each other.

They're clawing each other.

They're snarling each other.

They're biting each other.

It was unbelievable.

And they pulled them apart and put them into separate rooms.

They thought, what in the world was that all about?

At 9 a.m.

the next day, the doorbell rings, and it was a priest at appointment.

A Catholic priest was bringing by a woman to be examined by Dr.

Gallagher.

She claimed that she was a high priestess of a satanic cult.

And he wanted her to be examined.

Was she demonically possessed?

Was she just crazy?

You don't have to tell me.

So at 9 a.m., the doorbell rings for his appointment.

Bingo.

And Dr.

Gallagher opens the door.

And here's this woman who claims to be a high priestess of a satanic cult, who kind of looks up at him and sneers at him

and says, so,

How'd you like those cats last night?

There's something going on.

Yeah!

Got you with the cats, dude.

It's good stuff.

It's good stuff.

No notes.

Nope.

What a story.

Good work, demons.

Convincing story, well told.

So Richard Gallagher is a disaster.

Yeah.

According to his story, he was a doctor minding his own business when he got called on to consult about a woman who he refers to as Julia, who claims that she was the queen of a satanic cult.

Sure.

She'd reported herself to a priest who wanted to talk to Gallagher about whether she was mentally ill or maybe that this was a real possession situation.

Interesting priest.

Hence the consult.

Naturally.

In the context of their sessions, Gallagher claims that he witnessed magical things that Julia did, like levitating for half an hour and seeming to do telekinesis.

Amazing.

He's seen all sorts of stuff, like all this kind of crazy shit.

Yeah.

But unfortunately, he just has to take his word for it.

There's no proof of anything.

You just got to kind of take his word.

Gallagher's seen so much magic, but nobody can prove any of it, which is part of the devil's plan.

Yeah.

He was interviewed in Esquire in 2020, and he had the best explanation for why there's no proof of anything he claims.

Quote, you're dealing with creatures who know you're studying them, observing them, and trying to tape them.

A lot of people think they're going to capture evidence on camera and prove the existence of demons to the world, but these creatures know when they're being filmed.

They're not about to cooperate when a large part of their efforts have been to hide themselves.

They're not about to make their existence obvious to people.

That is fair.

It makes total sense.

I mean, they are, first off, they're

canonically older than us, right?

So they've had more practice being existing.

They never die.

They have exactly the same amount of experience with cameras.

That is a good point.

That is a good point.

There's no way they could possibly have had more experience than us on account of we invented them.

Unless they invented them somehow?

I guess that's possible.

I suppose.

So I like a demon that operates on the same rules as fairies for Charles Dickens.

So that's nice.

I appreciate that.

I don't fuck with your cats.

I don't, man.

If that's what you got, if that's what you got, how you like them cats last night,

you're done.

No demon.

I'm not afraid of demons.

Right.

fear.

Zero fear.

Yep.

Yep.

I have had a number of nights where Celine has acted out of character.

Yeah.

Out of sorts, where she'll be like running around the house all crazy.

Yep.

The next day, witches have not shown up at my house and taunted me about her running around.

Oh, I also need to make a correction.

Gallagher didn't actually see Julia levitate.

He just heard from some other people that she did.

Oh, my God.

So I'm convinced.

You know, this is why you got to give a little bit of respect to L.

Ron Hubbard.

At least whenever he tried to prove it, he got a crowd out there.

He had the woman trained to do the thing.

And then obviously she failed in going clear as bullshit.

Right.

But at least he gave it a shot.

He's a gambler.

Yeah, right?

What if it worked this one time?

Yeah.

It'd be crazy.

So there's no information in this story that doesn't come from Gallagher himself.

So a naturalistic explanation for this is that Gallagher is not trustworthy.

He believes other people telling him that someone levitated.

So I wouldn't be too surprised if this woman showed up at his house and said, like, nice cats.

And that turned into proof that she'd possessed the cats the night before or some dumb shit.

Anyway.

How do you like those cats?

Is that a genuine question?

Yes, it is.

I'm genuinely interested.

As a high priestess of a Satan cult, we're pretty into cats, buddy.

It's kind of our thing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So possession happens.

Sure.

Possession's nine-tenths of the law.

Nice.

But this is a different

God's law.

No.

No.

And there's no nine-tenths with possession, demon-wise, because a true Christian can't be possessed.

Okay.

Because God's in there.

A true Christian cannot be demonically

possessed.

And the reason is a true Christian is indwelled by the Holy Spirit.

He can't be indwelled by evil and good like that in the same way at the same time.

So Christians are ruined.

Physically possessed, physically

oppressed.

They can be hectored.

They can be bothered.

They can be attacked by demons.

And

there are some amazing examples of that.

I just mentioned a couple.

So how does he know that?

Like, has he done studies on Christians and found that it's impossible to possess them?

Yeah, I'm interested in this.

I'm interested in some corroboration on, quote-unquote, a true Christian.

There's nothing.

It sounds like a perfect time, though, for Tucker to chime in and say, I was hectored by a demon.

Exactly.

Strangely, it doesn't come up.

But he wasn't possessed.

So he should bring up that he is a true Christian.

Otherwise, he he would have been possessed.

But he was true, so he was hectored.

So he was just hectored.

Yep.

Let me ask you this question.

Please.

Is the ratio of Christian

proportional to the ratio of possession?

Right?

So if I'm like 40% Christian, do I get a 60% demon possession?

No, I don't think so.

I think it's all or nothing.

It's all or nothing.

All right, so you're either true Christian or you're demon-possessible.

I think that,

yeah, with the Holy Spirit when it comes in you.

True.

It's not, it's just a yes or no proposition.

It's not, it's not, there's no half Holy Spirit.

All right.

All right.

And hey,

that's the closest thing to believing his points I'll have.

It's like, yeah, it's all or nothing.

Good.

Okay.

Okay.

So I'm the demon.

Yeah.

Right.

I don't have a physical form.

No.

Because you're an angel originally.

Exactly.

We don't marry.

Right, right, right.

And I'm definitely not married.

And so I'm like, ah, I'm going to possess this person.

You dating?

Do I know in advance can I see like oh no there's the Holy Spirit so I'm not even gonna bother this person or is it while I'm trying to possess you that I get hit by the Holy Spirit and I'm like motherfucker and then I start like poking you it's like an airplane bathroom yeah is that what we're doing okay all right occupy it that's what I needed to know that's what I needed to know I think that's how I imagine all right so look there's miracles all around us sure and uh Lee talks about his standard for figuring out whether something is a miracle that's a good question or someone just saying some stuff.

That's a good question.

For me, as I investigate, another area I investigate in the book are miracles.

And for me, if you have solid documentation, medical documentation, if you have multiple eyewitnesses with no motive to deceive, if you have no natural explanation that seems logical that it can account for the phenomenon, and if it takes place in the context of prayer, then I think it's logical to conclude that a miracle has taken place.

Yes.

And there have been miracles published in peer-reviewed medical journals.

So, Lee's standard for justifying belief in a miracle is faulty, and I don't believe for a second he isn't fully aware of it.

Yeah.

He says that he'll believe something is a miracle if people involved don't have a motive to lie about it.

Does he think that Billy Graham has a huge motive to lie about that story about the missionary or not?

Like, what is he, what's his take on that?

I don't think I trust Lee's ability or willingness to judge whether someone has a motive to lie about something.

And even in a perfect world, people often have hidden motives.

Lee is selectively gullible, which is on purpose.

Yeah.

And it's a business strategy and a survival mechanism for this bullshit.

Yeah.

It is interesting to have so much burden of proof for a miracle and no burden of proof for a demon can't get inside you if you're a true Christian.

Right.

Obviously.

Yeah.

There's too much of the Holy Spirit in you.

The guy can't fit.

Mm-hmm.

Because it's got a physical.

Well, you know.

No, he doesn't.

Nope.

No, he doesn't.

Nope.

Nope.

Yeah.

So, but, you know, you want that burden of proof.

And you want to hear what the information is.

Absolutely.

How about something that's published in a fucking journal?

Yes.

Okay, I gotcha.

Nice.

And there have been miracles published in peer-reviewed medical journals.

I talked about one in my book.

Here's a woman who was blind for 12 years with an incurable condition.

She went to a school for the blind.

She learned to read Braille.

She walked with a white cane.

And she married a Baptist pastor.

And one night, they're getting ready to go to bed.

She's already in bed.

He comes over to her and he puts his hand on her shoulder and he begins to cry.

And he begins to pray.

And he says, Lord, I know you can heal my wife.

I know you can heal her right now.

And I pray that you do it tonight.

And with that, she opened her eyes to perfect vision.

She said, I was blind when my husband prayed for me.

He prayed.

I opened my eyes.

I can see.

It's a miracle.

That was researched by multiple medical researchers and published in a medical journal as a case study.

What do you do with that?

What do you do with it?

What did they do with it?

What did they?

It kind of leaves it up to

the reader to say, what's your conclusion?

Because they were upset by it.

Well, yeah, but it certainly does point toward a supernatural event.

Who is upset about what?

Right?

Are you saying that the hospital people are like, oh, miracles?

I hate it when God heals people.

Tucker has such a knee-jerk, instinctual need to make himself and Christians the victim and everything.

Yeah.

It's very sad.

Everybody would be like, hooray.

Everybody was like, hooray.

This is fine.

This is great.

So this is from a 2021 article published in the journal Explorer.

To put it as politely as possible, Explore is a bullshit journal that publishes a ton of pseudo-scientific stuff and it is not taken seriously in an academic setting.

But just saying that would be shooting the messenger.

So I decided to give this article a little once.

You decided to explore it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

As the the name would suggest or demand.

Learn for yourself.

So the woman in this case study was born in 1940 and went blind for unknown reasons in 1958 when she was 18.

This timing is a small issue because as the paper points out, quote, this case predates the availability of much of the ophthalmologic testing now used for diagnoses.

That means that the information about her condition that led to the experience of sudden blindness is murky, and we don't really know all that much.

She was married to a pastor and and then in 1972, he prayed for her to regain her sight, and she did that night.

Apparently, this was not something he had prayed about prior in their years of marriage, which I find to be an incredibly dubious claim.

Also, if true, he's kind of a dick.

Right.

Yeah.

So, this also stuck out to me from the case study.

Quote: Their only prior experience with prayer for healing seems to be when the patient and her husband had briefly visited the meeting of a well-known healing evangelist, but they left before the time in the meeting when the healing practices practices began.

That gives me the same kind of energy as Bill Clinton saying he didn't inhale.

You know what I mean?

Like, I don't believe you.

Wow.

You went to this faith healer.

Come on.

Of course.

Calm down.

Get the hell out of here.

So he says that she had instantly perfect vision, but in fact, the next documentation of her vision is from 1974, two years after she regained her sight, and she was 20 over 100.

I don't know if science has a specific explanation for why this woman regained her sight, but I also don't think that the details of this case are that compelling.

For one, I don't believe that they never prayed for her to be healed before.

But even leaving that stuff aside, this case is

being published in a shady journal.

And if you go to the funding section, you'll see that it was paid for by the very suspiciously named Global Medical Research Institute.

A lot of words that sound good.

Man, those are the scariest names in the history of the world.

Americans are great.

Foundation.

Can't trust you.

The GMRI is an outlet that funds papers and promotes the medical benefits of proximal intercessory prayer or laying on hands, like as opposed to prayer over distance.

Right, right, right, right.

Yeah.

This is a critically biased source, as evidenced by a blog post on their website titled, Should I Support GMRI?

Quote, the answer is that you can't afford not to support GMRI.

Without strong scientific evidence that in-person prayer has positive effects on health, authorities have prevented prevented Christians from offering prayer and claiming that they even believe God can heal.

Sure.

This is a faith healing advocacy group, so it's hard to imagine that they would publish a study of someone miraculously getting their vision back and then work all that hard to poke holes in the idea that faith healing did it.

Yeah.

Treating this case critically is literally the opposite of their mission statement, and it shows.

These are all like very serious credibility issues that Lee would care about if he was actually the person he's pretending to be.

Yeah.

If he were actually interested in sorting out the truth from bullshit in the area of the supernatural, then he wouldn't be so excited to embellish and misrepresent information like this that comes from obviously biased sources.

You know, it's interesting to think of my origin story in the context of God being real.

Right?

So my origin story begins with faith healing gone wrong, where they tried to do the faith healing and then they killed the kid.

Right?

So if they still want to do the the faith healing is real thing then they have to say that god chose specifically to kill this kid right through maybe the leader of your group wasn't uh on the up and up whatever you like god disfavored him sure exactly but again god chose to kill this kid as opposed to healing these other kids well it's the same with literally every like miracle healing exactly you have to be like well okay well then i guess he chose all of these other people are dying right right but in this specific context, it also is an

organization that broke up because of it.

So God also included breaking up this Christian organization.

So does that mean they were all evil?

Or that maybe, you know, any number of possible

went wrong in order to knock over all the dominoes that it would take for you to be here.

Exactly.

Yeah, any number of those things.

But the point being...

That's a miracle.

If you're going to do the anecdote story, you have to do both of them.

They both exist within the same context.

Or

I feel like just stop it with the anecdote.

Like,

the way that he's trying to convey this information is like really dumb.

And the rhythm is so, like, these stories all have the same spoken word rhythm.

Yeah, but doesn't he, like what I said at the beginning, doesn't he kind of sound more pleasant than a lot of the people that we end up with?

He's got, I mean, yeah.

He has a smile in his voice.

He has a little laugh to him that I think he enjoys life more than a lot of these other assholes.

These are more fun stories to tell than the, like, like if you're choosing this side of things,

you've got the, we're all going to die, everything's going to explode, buy gold.

Or you've got, do you know what?

They prayed all night.

And what happened the next morning?

Miracles.

Yeah.

Like, that's pretty fun.

Yeah.

It's probably a better headspace.

Yeah.

So there's some more miracles if you're down.

Sure.

Let's see what we're doing.

I don't know if you wanted to hear about some more healing.

Yeah.

But here's what's interesting.

There's a woman with a PhD from Harvard who's a professor at Indiana University, major secular university.

And she said, I'd like to test whether miracles are possible.

How can we scientifically test that?

So here's what she did.

Miracles tend to cluster in places where the gospel is just breaking in.

And so we see them in China, in Mozambique, in Brazil, places where the gospel is taking root.

We see miracles taking place in a disproportionate number.

So she says, I'm going to put it to the test.

So she sends a team of scientists to Mozambique and researchers to Mozambique, and they go into the bush and they say, bring us all your deaf and blind.

So they bring all the people deaf, blind, or with severe hearing or vision problems.

They bring them and they test them scientifically right there.

What is your level of vision?

What is your level of hearing?

They get that scientifically established.

Then, immediately, they are prayed for in the name of Jesus by people who tend to have a track record of God using them that way.

Sure.

And then immediately after that, they're tested again.

Guess what they found?

Improvement in virtually every case.

In fact, get this.

The average improvement in visual acuity was tenfold.

Wow.

No, that's unacceptable.

No, what?

No, you can't.

You can't do like pretty good.

That's not how your God works.

You can't do like, oh, man, they went from 20 over 100 to 2040.

Can you believe that?

Right.

And if you look at the actual study, there's a bunch of people who have like false positives who claimed that they were better, but the numbers didn't show that.

All right.

I don't know about this.

Yeah.

So this story that Lee is telling goes back to a paper published in the Southern Medical Association's Journal in 2010.

This isn't a shady outlet like Explore, but you'll see that there are some very serious problems with this study.

Lee's version of the story is that a researcher at Indiana University wanted to test miracles.

So she went to Mozambique, and what do you know?

She found that prayer fixes everything.

It's all bullshit.

Amazing.

The author of this paper went to Mozambique because there was already a woman there claiming that she was healing everyone with prayer.

This was Heidi Baker, one of the founders of Iris Ministries, who, in collaboration with another missionary outlet called Global Awakening, was running charismatic Protestant services in rural Mozambique.

The researchers were at church services between June 4th and 12th, 2009, where people in attendance were told, hey, if you're deaf or blind, you should come up to this designated area where people will pray for you to be healed.

This is already shit based on the design of how they're carrying this out, but it gets worse.

Here's a description from the published paper about how they did their healing.

Published paper.

Yeah.

Gotcha.

Quote: Western and Mozambican Iris and Global Awakening leaders and affiliates who administered prayer all used similar protocol.

They typically spent 1 to 15 minutes, sometimes an hour or more, circumstances permitting, administering prayer.

They placed their hands on the recipient's head and sometimes embraced the person in a hug, keeping their eyes open to observe results.

In soft tones, they petitioned God to heal, invited the Holy Spirit's anointing, and commanded healing and the departure of any evil spirits in Jesus' name.

Those who prayed then asked recipients whether they were healed.

If the recipient responded negatively or stated that the healing was partial, prayer was continued.

If they answered in the affirmative,

this is making a murderer

in Mozambique.

If they answered, making a miracle.

Oh, boom, there we go.

If they answered in the affirmative, informal tests were conducted, such as taking recipients to repeat words or sounds like hand claps, intoned from behind or to count fingers from roughly 30 centimeters away.

If the recipients were unable or partially able to perform tasks, prayer was continued for as long as circumstances permitted.

Jesus Christ.

You basically have someone touching you and emotionally begging you to say that you have been healed.

And if you say no, they keep begging you.

It's a fundamentally flawed design for research.

And I would say that it's not even really all that established how severe or real the people's hearing and vision problems were.

The study makes it clear that they had a limited amount of time and a limited access to any kind of facilities or technology.

So like you could,

in theory, be at a charismatic Christian revival kind of thing.

And they're like, hey, I want to heal the blind.

And you could go up and pretend your vision was worse than it was.

And there's no way they would know.

No.

So like, all of this is shit.

It's not a good experiment.

It's not a controlled environment.

No.

It's not probably going to get you the results that you're looking for.

Also, like, this dude, Lee, is saying, like, oh, these miracles seem to pop up in places like Mozambique and Brazil.

And coincidentally, Heidi Baker works in Mozambique and Brazil.

It's crazy.

She's more miracles there because she's.

That's so crazy.

It's almost like she makes it up and follows it.

Yeah, well, could be.

So all this is nonsense.

And none of this should be surprising because the funding for this study came from the John Templeton Foundation, an outlet run by a weirdo Christian billionaire who believes in faith healing.

He's also dead now, but his family's still.

That sounds right.

The researcher who wrote the paper is named Candy Gunther Brown, who strangely was a member of the board of directors of the Global Medical Research Institute, the faith healing promotional outlet that paid for the blindness case.

We're getting a lot of strikes.

Yeah, yeah.

The GMRI itself began as a part of Global Awakenings, which is the charismatic Christian group that put on the tent revival meetings in Mozambique.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

These would all be very suspicious details to Lee if you were interested in assessing the veracity of the claims that these people are making.

But instead, you can see how uncurious he is, which is suspicious.

No, no, no.

Look at that.

There's so much corroboration.

They're all corroborating

each other.

Each other,

it's not corroborating itself.

Right.

That would be ridiculous.

So hold on now.

You mean to tell me that this

super independent and bold researcher at Secular Indiana University is a board member of a faith-healing promotional outlet.

Okay.

That's my favorite.

That's my favorite evangelical speak that I just love so much.

They can't help themselves but from reinforcing, like, that secular universe.

Like, what are we doing?

Well, it's like Alex saying things are in the mainstream news.

Right.

It's like even the secular people believe us.

Yeah, exactly.

Like, what are you doing?

What is happening?

So a lot of these studies are bad.

No.

Yeah.

But they seem so scientific, which also is empiricism, but also we require faith.

It's also not scientific, and I have no faith in it.

Fair.

But thankfully, Lee is a go-getter.

He decided, I'm going to fucking go ahead and do a study myself.

Hell yeah.

Yeah.

So here we get to learn about that.

Let's hear it.

I did a study.

I hired a public opinion firm to do a scientifically accurate study of American adults.

And I asked the question, have you ever had one experience, at least in your life, that you can only explain away as being a miracle of God?

38% of American adults said yes.

Wow.

And by the way, let's say

99% of them are wrong.

Let's say they think it was a miracle, but it was just a big coincidence.

So let's just wipe out 99% and say, no, no, no, you thought it was a miracle.

It really wasn't.

Let's wipe away 99%.

Guess what?

That would still mean there would be a million miracles nearly in the United States.

Wow.

If we're going to assume that 99% of these folks are wrong about the thing they can't explain being a God-based miracle, why can't we assume it's possible that 100% are wrong?

There's no proof of anything here.

And yet, Lee is reporting on his self-directed opinion poll as if it's evidence of a million miracles.

Made it.

When he's delivering this kind of information, it shines through how much his work, like, this work is like intonation.

He needs to sell things as meaning something because if he just delivered this flatly, it would sound so dumb.

Imagine, imagine for a minute.

No, no, no.

Close your eyes and imagine that 99%

of them aren't real.

99%.

That's me being unreasonably unfair from my piece because you might think it's 50-50.

You might think it's 60-40.

But I am giving you secular Indiana University a 99-point head start.

But if one of them is right.

Yeah, Jordan, I got to tell you, there have been 10,000 reported cases of goblins out on the streets.

Yes, and if 99% of those cases are bullshit.

Right.

If just 1% is true.

That's a lot of goblins.

That's a lot of goblins.

Maybe we got a goblin problem.

Yikes.

This is dumb.

So that poll that Lee did was part of a book he released in 2020 called The Case for Miracles, which is part of his The Case for series, where he pretends to present empirical evidence for religious things.

Right.

Weirdly, one of the things he argues is a miracle in that book is the study about faith healings in Mozambique, authored by Candy Gunther Brown.

How about that?

It's almost like a bunch of this new book is cut and paste from the other one that he published five years ago, because who gives a shit?

It's tough to write a new book, and people really just want to hear the hits.

They don't care.

They don't care.

No.

Nobody's reading that book being like, ah, update your miracles.

It's just for the jolt of, yeah, it's all real.

Yeah, and tell the story with a couple of change some adjectives or whatever.

And people forget that it's the same miracle.

Absolutely.

Because they're all the same miracle.

God, what a dick.

Anyway,

Satan.

What about him?

He's the ruler of the world, some say.

Why?

What's he up to?

See, this is why you and Tucker would get along.

Because he has the same question.

That's a good question.

Why is Satan?

Why?

What's he up to?

There's a couple references, at least a couple references, in the New Testament to Satan being the ruler of the earth.

Yes.

What does that mean?

It means that in this realm, he in many ways has his way.

In other words, he has access to be able to influence people and point them away from the one true hope that there is, which is God.

And so he prowls about, as the Bible says, as a lion,

hoping to tear people apart spiritually.

I mean,

if that's not true, then explain the First World War.

Yeah.

I mean, there is just no

explanation even now, over 100 years later, for why that war started.

Oh, you know, Archduke Ferdinand got shot to death in Sarajevo.

Really?

Okay, that's not a real explanation, actually.

Why did Christian Europe commit suicide?

Yeah.

And

there are many other wars and many other tragedies in all of our lives.

Like, that doesn't make any sense.

It's clearly

supernatural forces are acting in people.

I agree.

Or like the time you were asleep and a demon attacked you.

Look,

I think World War I was probably demons.

It definitely couldn't be concentrating too much power in a small group of people who are somehow related to each other.

Well, you know, demons.

Oh, okay.

It could be demons.

See, but here's the thing that I like about this.

Yeah.

This is a plot point in Eternal Darkness, one of my favorite video games.

That

the elder gods

are manipulating humans into killing each other because they need the blood.

Right.

So World War I is just part of their feast.

Right.

And so, I guess Tucker believes that about God.

I mean, I do appreciate the motivated reasoning behind it because the other option is we all do government bad.

That really fucks up everything that everybody's doing because maybe we should stop doing it.

You know?

Yeah, and I think that a lot of the political preferences that Tucker has in specific

are ones that

are definitely

not, they lead to World War I-ish type things.

If he was going to build a society, it would look exactly like it did when World War I happened, thus World War I would happen.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, there's a high probability.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So looks Satan.

Yeah.

Right?

Yeah.

This guy.

He's a bad guy.

But he's also got to go.

He's got to go places.

Right.

He's busy.

Right.

Well, I mean, he's got so much much to do to rule the world.

Yeah, absolutely.

What's his administration strategy like?

Well, I don't know if we ever get to find that out.

Yeah.

But we do find out that he's efficient and he is good with time and is a prioritized.

Well, then put him in charge.

If Satan were smart, which he is,

would he go around the country and around the world trying to possess or bother average everyday people?

Well, you know what?

How does he try?

it's efficient to go to Hollywood and to influence a bunch of people there who are very influential in, let's say, the entertainment industry.

And let's say he encourages them to create films and television shows that are

funny and that are creative and that are fun, but there's an underlying message to them.

I feel like that's

a normalization of immoral activity

that makes it normal.

Because, you know, when we laugh, it opens us up to various possibilities.

When we laugh, laugh, our defenses come down.

So, I'm thinking of a wonderful, funny TV show like Friends.

Remember, Friends, the TV show was on TV for years.

Satan's Friends

who never saw it, but yeah.

But underlying that is a very ugly sexual ethic

that normalizes multiple sexual partners, you old thing.

That sort of thing.

The kind of thing that Satan would love to inculcate into American culture.

Oh, friends.

Are you bitching about friends in 2025?

Yeah.

I mean, look.

Yeah.

There's things that were on before friends.

I mean, people have had sex for so many years.

Seinfeld was on before friends.

The golden girls.

The golden girls got laid all the time.

At least Blanche.

Absolutely.

So, like, I mean, this guy sucks.

This is amazing.

The devil made friends.

Imagine.

What?

What a fucking.

And listen.

What a fucking devil that is.

That is a smart devil.

Could he be more funny?

Man.

The devil, you know, the greatest trick he ever pulled was the Rachel.

I'm a haircut.

I'm such a big fan of when people have a genius evil villain who does exactly the dumbest possible thing that they think would happen.

Because that's the only thing that makes sense.

It can't be that people have fun.

Well, people weren't really fucking before friends.

That's probably true.

I mean, the central perk, it got people going.

They, it was friends.

So before friends, everybody slept in the twin beds.

You know, like if you, you know, like in Casablanca, there's the twin beds, man.

It's the same thing.

But then friends happen.

Everybody's sleeping in the queen size

together where you can touch parts.

right disgusting and also i think the legacy of friends

taken as a whole is quite monogamous

i mean chandler and courtney cox get together and they get married ross and david everybody couples

yeah i don't i don't know if phoebe and and no but they they have yeah i don't think they get together but they're kind of weirdo joey gets a spin-off though so you've got that and then he does a movie with a monkey Is okay.

But that wasn't him.

If.

I mean, it wasn't in character.

If friends, devil, Joey?

Devil?

Yep.

Or

did Joey just negotiate that himself?

You know what I'm saying?

I think there was a lot of LeBlanc excitement.

I think people wanted to see him.

Sure.

I think this is fucking stupid, and obviously there's a bit of anti-Semitism to this.

Friends!

With the way

that it appears, it appeals to these classical narratives about Jewish people taking over Hollywood in order to erode the culture of the United States.

But I think it's more important to point out that Lee is a fucking dork.

Can you imagine that

what devil is rebelling against God so much so that they're tossed into the lake of fire?

And in the meantime, is like, well, I got to do friends.

The one where God threw me out of heaven.

That was the pilot.

We should have known.

We should have seen that in advance.

Yeah, that all makes sense.

It was a very distinct origin story.

Yeah.

So, this is all in service of making the argument that the devil is efficient and he wants to use mass media in order to sway people, as opposed to going and like whispering in your ear at your house.

No, that it does make sense because he can only be in one place at a time, he has a limited amount of demons.

I ask you this question: How did he get there?

To Hollywood, yeah, hitched.

Where did he start from?

I mean, the obvious obvious answer is going to be hell, but then, like, we can't, we need a physical.

There's a hell mouth somewhere.

I don't know.

Why can't he be in more than one place at the same time?

Because

he has to be corporeal, right?

Exactly.

Yeah, there's no way around that.

Because he can't travel.

Well, I would be interested to know.

Can he travel through the earth?

Can he walk from California to China?

You know what I mean?

Does he have phasing power?

Absolutely.

He can go through walls.

If he can be in one place,

can he teleport?

I think not, because if he can be in one place at one time, then he has mass, right?

That is, that would be, or at least, yeah, there's no other way to explain it.

Yeah.

There's just no other way.

Even if he's like a floating consciousness that is spaceless,

that is timeless.

Science will one day explain this, but for now, all we got to leave is

apparently

my science is shit.

So, So, this idea of like influencing leaders is something that they start talking about.

Sure.

And they get into

making priests abuse children.

That's what the devil does.

That feels very not like

that's what the devil's up to.

All right.

If I were trying to subvert and destroy, I would go after religious leaders.

Yeah.

I'd have them like molest kids or freaky sex lives or steal money from the church.

Yes.

And you do.

I've always noticed that the leadership of Christian churches

just

like numerically,

way more likely to be screwed up than the people in the pews.

Interesting.

Do you know what I mean?

You see these sex scandals with pastors and you're like, how many people who are going to church every Sunday have sex lives like that?

Probably not very many, but a pretty high percentage of pastors.

And I feel like

that is outside influence.

Look at teachers, too.

Teachers who young kids look up to.

You know, you can imagine when you were kindergarten, first grade, second grade, you looked up to your teachers.

Not one time.

There's not one teacher I liked.

Oh, really?

Oh, I sure did.

I never, no, I felt it was

an authoritarian situation.

I was totally opposed from kindergarten on.

I don't want to give you

one day where I respected or liked any of them, not a single one.

That is so funny.

I'm serious, dude.

That is so funny.

I happened to go to public school growing up, and yet, back then in the 50s and 60s,

most of the teachers are Christians.

And so, no, I had some warnings.

Man, they could hit you.

It taught me great lessons about

life.

You grew up in a better America than I did.

In Southern California in the 70s, I thought they were all buffoons, freaks.

I wasn't taking orders from them.

I really disliked them.

Sorry, excuse me.

What a loser.

That's funny.

But if you want to lead people astray, you subvert their leaders, I guess.

Yes, very much so.

Yeah, that's sure.

So I'm sure some of the teachers that Tucker had at the various boarding schools his parents paid for him him to go to were annoying.

But man, when I hear someone go off like that, it just feels like them venting their insecurity and their need to be better than any perceived authority figure.

I mean, that's pathetic.

I don't believe that anyone can go through a full education without encountering at least one example of an amazing teacher.

There are a lot of duds out there, but there are enough people who care and who are into what they do that I'm certain that any adult that says, I hated all my teachers, is a liar who's trying to look cool because emotionally they're still at that school.

Yeah.

And it's fucking fucking sad.

There are,

there are more than there should be teachers who care about this shit.

I mean, I dropped out of high school and I had a miserable time through a fair amount of my time in that, you know, in that era of life.

And I, there were a couple teachers that stick out to me as like amazing.

Yeah, no, it's ironic, but the reason that they can be treated so poorly is because they care so much about the students, they're willing to endure trash.

Yeah, and some of them suck.

And some of them suck.

Everybody, some people suck.

But

I would say that I'm always siding with a teacher over Tucker.

I think in this.

Yeah, yeah, it would be.

You know what?

You're right.

If there was ever any single person that could defeat that,

it's got to be him.

So

they're trying to make friends, the show.

Right.

They're trying to get the teachers.

Right.

And now they're trying to sway the kids by having drag performers read to them.

And you look at if Satan's going to go after children, what is all this stuff about libraries doing children's readings and drag shows to little kids?

Why?

Why would that happen?

You know what?

Because if you can capture the mind of a child very young, it could influence them for the rest of their life.

What happens because we put up with it?

Yeah.

We do.

A healthy society would not put up with it.

That's true.

For five minutes.

That's true.

Yeah.

Sorry, they'd drive them out of the temple immediately with a whip.

Yeah.

Sorry, excuse me.

So you think that you believe that demons roam the earth?

Yes.

Okay.

Sure.

Great.

So if I understand correctly, volunteering is what gets you kicked out of the church.

Yeah.

Or I guess,

you know, being gay or a drag performer or, you know, like...

That doesn't.

No, there's no.

You could just dress.

You could dress in full clothing.

There's a drag doesn't, drag is a, doesn't mean anything in this context.

It's just purely like a short term for anybody who looks different.

Yeah, yeah.

No, of course.

And the society wouldn't put up with this is, uh, boy, that's a standard that gets broad real fast.

1950s America is your hero worshiping time period.

Yeah.

I think that like

that mentality that Tucker's expressing, a healthy society wouldn't put up with this, we would have driven them out a long time ago, is exactly what everyone has always been like, this is what you're saying.

Yep.

And now he's just, you can just say it.

You're a Nazi.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So

a functioning society would burn all of its undesirables.

Yeah.

Beyond that, they're like outside the norm.

Yeah.

Or would be too threatening and must be gotten rid of.

We should definitely have a bunch of scientists talk about how euthanasia is a preferable option.

It's empirical.

Yep.

So, look, some people are evil.

Sure.

But what about places?

That is a good question.

Obviously, places can be evil in and of themselves.

This clip bums me out

because I think Tucker wants to talk about a haunted house

and he just won't let himself.

Oh, my God.

I think there is

just as miracles tend to break out in a positive way in places where the gospel is breaking in, I think we probably see pockets around the globe where Satan has a stronghold.

And I would think that

physical places.

The Middle East.

Like, I think Haiti is a good example of that.

I've been to some places in the U.S.

where I felt that really strongly.

I was in a house once.

I lived in a house once as a child.

We're part of the house.

There was something so wrong with it.

And every person who lived in the house knew that.

Does that sound?

Could be.

Could be.

Could be an occultic thing.

Yeah.

What's a mystical dream?

Tell me about the haunted house.

Tell me about your haunted house.

I have a poltergeist.

I'm so disappointed with that pivot to tell me about mystical dreams.

That's bullshit.

Yeah.

If there was something in your house.

My childhood home was haunted.

Absolutely.

Tell me about your dumb fucking haunting.

Yeah.

God, be great.

So, mental illness is something that exists.

Got to euthanize them, too.

Well,

not really.

Okay.

Because they don't exist.

Oh.

There are certain forms of what we refer to as mental illness,

which is

a phrase invented by people pretty recently.

And clearly there are forms of mental illness, I think, I guess, whatever that is.

But there are certain people who have visions that are very unpleasant.

Yes.

And that bear like almost a precise resemblance to the demonic possession described in the New Testament.

And

they may be demonic.

I don't know.

I have to evaluate each one to try to determine.

Of course,

these are broad brushes, but you do.

Is it fair to

conclude that maybe not everything the shrink tells you is mental illness?

They can never describe where it comes from or how to fix it.

They have no idea.

But whatever.

They know nothing, to be clear.

But is it fair to assume that maybe some of that is spiritual?

Yes, I think it can very well be.

So Tucker should probably just come out with it and say that he doesn't believe that mental illness is real and that people who don't conform to the sorts of behaviors he wants to see from them are probably possessed and should be beaten until the demon leaves their body.

This weird middle ground where he's very clearly expressing that he doesn't believe in mental illness but also refuses to commit to that position feels dishonest and kind of cowardly.

What Tucker is doing is saying that he doesn't believe that psychiatry and psychology have the answers for what society calls mental illness, so instead you should accept his even less grounded conclusions about demons.

It's fine to think that mental health as a field, it doesn't have all the answers and can't provide magic solutions to people's problems, but that doesn't validate the conclusion Tucker is trying to get to and replace it with.

Yeah.

It's like they're forgetting to do the part where they have to actually prove there are demons.

They're just kind of waving their hands around, whining about how we don't know everything about the world, and then demanding that I take demons seriously.

And I'm not going to.

I mean,

it's funny.

It's always funny, and it's always fun.

But then it's like the real reason for demons is so eventually you can call people demons and then kill them.

Sure.

That's why we have demons.

That's why we have the word demonization.

Demons exist so eventually we can say that there is a person who needs to be killed.

That's what it is.

Well, and it's unfortunate because that's, you know, the demon won't leave them.

Yeah, Yeah, I mean, hey, it's it makes me a good person for murder.

Isn't that amazing how great demons are in that I can murder somebody, but I'm a good person for it.

It's it's merciful in a way.

It's crazy how good a person I am.

Why am I wearing this swastika?

Uh, hey, it wasn't originally.

Oh, there we go.

It's uh India.

You know what I'm saying?

There we go.

Yeah, I learned.

So, you ever speak in tongues?

I've been to

cough was part of my speaking in tongues.

I've been to tongue speakings.

Really?

No.

I've seen some speaking in tongues.

I don't know if I have.

I mean, I've seen like trance people trying to like, you know, speak for aliens and stuff.

Definitely that.

I don't know if I've seen.

Definitely not in person.

I don't think I've seen speaking in tongues.

It's weird.

But it seems like it would be pretty easy, based on super easy, what Lee says.

I have not experienced that personally,

but I have credible

people who do and have experienced that.

There are other Christians, though, who say, no, no, no, that ended with the apostles.

So that's one of those side issues theologically that when we get to heaven, we can raise our hands and ask God, hey, what about that speaking in tongues thing?

Yeah, no, I know that there is a debate over it.

I have no idea what I think about it.

How?

It is true.

I guess just as a factual matter, it's true that there are people who, seized by some unseen force, begin speaking speaking in languages they have never learned.

Yes, and often this is

generally, I would say, this is not a language that other people speak.

It is a

spiritual language.

But then there's someone, and this is a good corroboration, someone who can interpret that.

And they understand it.

That is a good corroboration.

It's a spiritual language.

It's not Latin.

It's not Greek.

It's a spiritual language and that someone else is able to hear.

And they have a gift as well to interpret what is being said.

what Lee seems to be describing is someone speaking gibberish and then another person making up a translation.

Yep.

If the only people who can interpret this language are also people who have a special gift, it seems to me that this is basically a short-form improv game.

Yep.

Also, Lee is supposed to be the guy who studied this and really tried to prove that these miracles are real, and he hasn't seen anyone speak in tongues.

Like, you said you've seen it, and if you give me a week, I probably could find somebody.

Probably.

Yeah.

What are you doing, Lee?

It's one of my favorite things that's ever been invented.

I think it's one of my favorite things

to be able to pull this off, right?

This is the simplest two-man game in the history of religion.

It goes way back because, obviously, if you can convince a bunch of rubes that you can speak in a language that only this other person could understand, you can fleece them for everything.

Yeah, yeah.

It's good.

It's a great game.

I would con people right now if I could.

I honestly think that it is an improv warm-up.

I think that doing that is a...

I mean, there's probably something to it now in a more

genuine way, but it comes from stealing from people.

Yeah.

It's...

Yeah.

All improv comes from stealing.

Well, there's that.

That's definitely true.

Improv classes are theft, at least.

So have you died?

Have I died?

No.

Have you had a near-death experience?

I don't believe so.

Hmm.

Okay.

Yeah.

Do you believe in them?

No.

Okay.

Well, you and Lee disagree on that.

That seems right.

What's a near-death experience?

A near-death experience is when a person is clinically dead.

That is, generally, no brain waves, no respiration, no brain heartbeat.

Yeah.

What?

Clinically dead.

Yet, they're going to be revived.

And so they are dead for a period of time, clinically dead.

but they're not permanently dead.

So the body will be revived as someone.

Mostly dead.

So by the measurements of science, they're

that's right.

That's right.

So maybe right there, if we just pause, like maybe right there, we have further evidence that science, while useful, of course, and life-improving in some ways, does not have the tools to measure the totality of the experience.

If Lee really believes that this is what near-death experiences are, then it kind of makes Jesus's whole thing not seem that special.

I'm not religious, but this seems like a heretical position.

Lee is playing word games here because clinical death is a specific term that means that you're not breathing and your heart is stopped.

For certain conditions like aneurysms, patients can be put into a state of clinical death in order for the doctors to operate on them.

It's risky, but it's manageable by modern science.

It is what it is.

Lee is saying that people who have near-death experiences have no brain function, and that's not part of clinical death.

These people did not come back from having no brain function and no blood flow, or else Jesus wasn't that big of a deal.

There's no third option here because you're dead if your brain and your body are dead.

Well, I mean, what you're.

If these people can die and then be revived by human-made shit,

then we have the same power over life or death.

That's true.

And if you can put someone into a state of death and then bring them back.

And then bring them back.

Yeah.

That's some Frankenstein shit.

Well, I think it's either Frankenstein shit or we need to update and refine our position on what death is.

Because death does have to be the point of no return.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's just conceptually what that is.

You're no longer a thing.

Yeah.

And so if we can turn on and off hearts, you know,

as we need to for surgeries and shit, then like, that's no longer death.

Yeah.

The faster we can figure that shit out, the faster we can figure out whether or not there's a soul.

Right.

Because if death is what you're saying it is, then that is when the soul has left you or the anima or the breath, or the whatever it is you want to call it.

Yeah, and I can't help but also say that this is a really good argument for why science updates with new information.

Yeah.

Science would have told you that death is one thing previously.

Yeah.

And then as we gained more information, learned more, the definition of death has to change along with that.

Because we've fixed it.

Yeah.

So, I don't know.

I think science is fine.

Also, wasn't there the guy who was like, I'm going to put some stuff on top of high places in case people have the near-death experience where they can see outside their body?

You know, like, hey, take a look.

See if you can see this picture of my grandson on the top drawer.

I don't know about that.

There is one story that he tells of a woman who said that there was a red sticker on

one of the ceiling fan

things.

But that's just a story from a preacher's book.

I don't know if that's true.

There's no corroboration of it.

Yeah, that sounds right.

But while I was poking around, I did find that

when

doctors are doing these surgeries, they have asked people afterwards if they had a near-death experience when they had to turn off their heart.

And all of them said no.

So like the ability to recreate a near-death experience has been unsuccessful.

Almost scientifically.

Right.

And so I don't, I'm not familiar specifically with what you're talking about, but I would believe that some asshole would do that and then be like, what's up?

Did you see that shit?

Yeah?

Eh?

Did you see that?

No, then you worked out.

I imagine some prick would do that to a recovering patient.

Very unnecessary.

Oh, you're going to die soon.

I'm going to put this up there.

Tell me if you can see it.

No.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

So

you're a no on souls, right?

I'm a no on souls.

I think I'm gonna go with a no on souls.

You can't be president.

That's fair.

That's not only tragic, it's dangerous because

if you believe we are only our brain, we're only neurons that are firing,

that means technically we have no free will.

And seriously, you're saying we don't have free will.

How do you punish someone for doing something wrong if they really didn't have any free will?

It also means we have no inherent rights.

We have no right and wrong.

Does a rock have a right?

No.

Exactly.

Right.

So maybe that should be

the first

for leadership.

If you don't believe human beings have souls, if that's not the basis of the way you understand other people, there's a separate person with a distinct and unique soul.

Right.

If you don't believe that,

you can have no power in our society.

Is that fair?

I like that.

I like that.

I never thought of that before, but I certainly wouldn't trust a person personally, morally, if they believed only that we are.

I wouldn't give a driver's license.

That's scary.

It is scary.

You don't think other people have souls?

Exactly.

What?

You're a psychopath.

Exactly.

So, all right.

So now we're going to pass a law that you can't get elected to an office if you don't believe that people have souls, right?

That's good.

Yeah, let's do that.

So what's a soul?

Oh, anything that I choose to keep you from being elected to office for.

If you believe the humans have souls, but like in more like an Eastern tradition kind of way, that conception of souls, can you get elected?

No.

Or do you have to have a Christian Western?

Also, you have to be white.

Ah, shit.

Also, small flaw in this plan, if you don't believe anyone have souls, then, you know, but I still like, if I'm that person, but I want to get into power, there's no reason for me not to lie and say I believe in souls.

It would be ridiculous.

Apparently, without souls, morality is impossible.

So lying isn't wrong for me in that situation.

And I can't get into office if I don't say that people have souls.

Right.

I think for the most part, you're never going to get someone running for office who's public about believing that humans are just piles of meat.

True.

It's not the kind of message that drives people out to vote.

So I think this is a problem that solves itself for Tucker.

Yeah.

And I think that he's just being a little douche.

Yeah.

Yeah, the arguments are so fucking stupid, especially because, again, if you think it's over when it's over, then you won't care so much about saving people's souls

by letting them die in a bunch of different ways or killing them in a bunch of different ways.

Brother Soul had a chance.

You'll be more like,

oh, life is precious on account of it it ends.

Well, see, but that life is precious thing is what makes me feel like this might be a crypto conversation about abortion and reproductive rights.

Yeah, I would say so.

But they never make that surface.

Right.

You know, they never bring it to the forefront, but it feels like maybe that's kind of

what they're saying with this acid test for...

Well, I mean, ultimately, the problem with the soul is that when does it go in there?

Because when you're talking about abortion, you're talking about the soul.

When does the soul enter the body or whatever it is right around

exactly and then once you try and scientifically answer that question you sound like a fucking moron uh it's the third trimester that's what yeah but see that's why you make noises god puts the soul in the third trimester why it's around the you know that's that's about when the soul comes okay so when the sperm and the egg what why

Is it the soul already been in there?

Do they, something special happen?

Do they put the soul in?

If there is a soul, does it have mass?

If there's there's no soul, then why can't there be fucking demons inside of you?

If also there's a Holy Spirit?

Well, sometimes there's bad soul.

Okay, well, that's fair.

And sometimes there's collective soul.

Sure.

And then sometimes there's a Wreath of Franklin.

Well, yep.

You got to respect it.

Got to respect it.

So another thing you got to respect is Cambridge-educated people who want to tell you.

Well, what if they tell you that you have a soul?

Then you got to respect it.

I don't think I trust them at all.

I saw an interview in my book with a PhD from Cambridge University in Neuroscience who says the evidence is so

persuasive that yes, indeed, we do have a soul.

We do have a sphere.

Thank you.

Yes.

Thank you, neuroscience.

Yeah.

Frank confirms.

This interview that he does with the doctor is a name, her name is Sharon Deericks, and she's the one who blew his mind about the smell of coffee.

That sounds right.

In the interview, he asks her if there's good evidence for a soul in an afterlife, to which she replies, quote, there have been various studies conducted in the United States, the Netherlands, and elsewhere.

Of course, some stories could have been fabricated, but with others, there's very intriguing evidence.

Her answer is basically, people are looking into this and there's people making shit up, but some other stuff might be true.

That's not persuasive.

Who knows is another way of rephrasing that.

Yeah, and she goes on to say, quote, I suspect we'll see more data as research continues, but think about it this way.

All we really need is one documented case.

That statement says a lot, because what what it says most is that there are no documented cases of souls or the afterlife.

The Cambridge Neuroscientist is saying there's no evidence, but maybe one day.

For what it's worth, Deerix has a degree from Cambridge in Brain Imaging, but she doesn't work for the school.

She's a lecturer for the Oxford Center for Christian Apologetics, and almost all of her career has been writing religious books, like her most recent release, Broken Planet, an exploration of how it's possible for God to exist when we have all these natural disasters happening.

Oh my God.

Probably not climate change denial.

That is some good

apologia, if you will.

Yeah, so that's her thing.

This is all just Christian apologetics.

Yeah,

this is nuts.

I mean, I get it.

It's really hard now.

It was a lot easier.

I feel like the scales have tipped, right?

Back in the day, you've got the church behind you.

If you say you don't believe in God, you get murdered, right?

So you're riding high, right?

Now people are like, well answer these questions and you can't because none of it's real so you get real mad at that and now you got a Cambridge neuroscientist saying that it's okay for hurricanes and God to be the same like what are we doing get back to basics yeah well

you know I think that they sold too many books and people got a little too too used to

that'll happen yeah you sell too many books so we've got near-death experiences

and that's when someone dies they have some crazy times.

Sure.

And then they come back to their body and they're like, well.

Ah, I saw the light.

But there's another thing that happens.

Oh, yeah.

And that's close to death visions.

Okay.

And that's people who die.

But before they die, they

see a tunnel.

Right.

So nigh-death experiences, if you will.

Right.

And Tucker, for some reason, thinks that...

Everybody shouldn't be on drugs when they're dying because they need to have these visions.

Okay.

If you have one of these experiences before you die, you think they're going to think I'm, I've got dementia, they're going to think I'm nuts.

They're going to, they're going to think, you know, so a lot of people don't like to talk about it.

So there's a researcher.

He went to a huge hospice facility in New York State, and they went to all the dying people and they said, please, as a favor, if you have a vision, a dream unlike any you've ever had,

tell us.

Would you tell us?

And so

88%

of those dying people had a pre-death vision that they reported on before they died.

88%.

I think the other 12% probably had one, but they died before they were able to say anything.

Or they were so high on morphine, they couldn't talk.

That's true.

People get drugged up.

That's true.

So there's that.

I mean, obviously, you don't want people to suffer.

You want to alleviate suffering and alleviate pain.

I'm totally for that.

I want to be clear about it.

But there's also this custom, which has grown to ubiquity.

Now Now it's just, it's everybody who dies gets

from the hospice nurses.

Yeah.

They kill you with morphine.

I mean, no one wants to say that out loud, but I've seen it.

They kill you with morphine.

Yeah.

And

okay, first we should just be honest about what's happening always.

But second, we should be clear about the cost.

So if people, if

everybody on the way out is getting visions of some kind, maybe there's a purpose to the vision.

Maybe we shouldn't short-circuit that.

And talk maybe.

Maybe?

I hate these people.

So even if we just assume that everything that Tucker is saying isn't insane, then 88% of people who report having visions near death, that includes a lot of people on morphine.

He's just making up a rule that morphine blocks God's visions so he can complain about end-of-life care in a way that seems designed around wanting old people to suffer for their own good.

This was a study that was put out by the Palliative Care Institute, and as far as I can tell, it's not full of shit, but it also really doesn't seem to tell much.

Basically, 88% of patients in end-of-life care reported having visions, but the range of what that means was wide.

Some of them were comforting dreams, some were horrible and disturbing.

And the report says, quote, religious content was minimal.

The study specifically excluded people who had dementia, so all of those people, they were aware they were in hospice care and that death was probably pretty close.

It stands to reason that in that community, you'd see a higher incidence of people subconsciously trying to make peace with the process of dying, and having these dreams seems like exactly what you would expect.

It's interesting, and it's good to have data like this to help normalize the grieving process and make death easier for everyone, but it doesn't say anything about an afterlife.

Also, if you're in the hospital, you can refuse any medication they give you.

If you're dying and you don't want morphine, doctors aren't going to force it on you.

But a lot of people at that point are in so much pain.

I would so much rather live in a world where that's an option than one where no one's given painkillers in the last months of their life because Tucker thinks that they should have pain visions.

Yeah.

This is stupid.

He is a asshole.

Yeah.

Like, it's not even just dumb.

That's mean.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's

one of the problems with these people specifically, right, is that they're competing in this space where it feels like to them

it makes sense as part of their argument that it would be like, isn't 88% enough to convince you?

It's more than even 60%.

It's more than 70%.

That's a solid B plus, right?

But we're in the world of God.

We're in the world of is or is not.

It's 100% or it is zero.

There's no middle ground.

Let me be

God.

Well, but they got around that by saying like 12% died before they could report the...

They come up with excuses for why it is 100%.

But God doesn't need excuses.

He's God.

Let me do you one better.

Even if that study came back and found 100% of these people had dreams that they thought were unique and amazing.

Right.

I still don't think that's proof of an afterlife.

No.

I think these people are probably preoccupied with and dealing with death.

Yep.

They're dying in the hospital.

If 100% of them reported getting an orientation dream for how to behave following the end of this life, I would go, fuck, that is very specific.

Yes.

I don't even know how you would go about finding that out.

Ridiculous.

Yeah, if there was something that was a little bit more like that.

Like if they had this dream and came back with a uniform.

Yeah, absolutely.

Something was.

Guys, we got to talk about it.

This is the thing.

This is the thing.

What are you going to do?

But as it is, I think that if you go to camp you probably have last day of camp dreams yeah because you're gonna go home from camp like this is something that happens people

fucking idiots yep anyway let these old people have their drugs just fucking get them high and go to bed to jordan yeah what do you think about ghosts

You can't have, you can't have ghosts.

If you're going to go hard religion, you can't have ghosts.

Ghosts have to be angels and demons because otherwise, ghosts ghosts are souls that God is specifically leaving on earth for some reason.

Or they're on the run.

Or yeah, or they're actively like avoiding God's wrath or favor.

Yeah.

So I realize that I've set up all these questions so poorly and I should be asking you to try and predict what Lee thinks.

Sure.

You have a take, and I think it's a solid take.

Yeah.

And I think Lee is all for ghosts.

Well, I just, I think that their feeling on it is largely, no one likes ghosts.

The technical definition of a ghost is someone who dies but refuses to go into the afterlife.

Their spirit refuses to go into the next life.

I don't see that in the Bible.

So I don't think that ghosts, per se, are from God.

I think most likely an apparition that we interpret as being ghosts is most like a demonic apparition.

I think people feel that.

I think so.

Ghosts have a bad rap.

Yes.

Yeah.

No one is summoning ghosts.

It's not like Casper, who's going to bring you some flowers.

Generally, people are anti-ghosts.

Yes.

Ghosts suck.

Ghosts are bullshit, brah.

They bring a party down.

We are not fans of ghosts, regardless.

Here's what I like about this.

Let's leave the fact of their existence aside.

They suck.

Yeah.

Bunch of douchebags.

No one's ever laughed with a ghost.

No.

No.

Except for the times that they have.

But like, no, ghosts have laughed at you.

That's definitely true.

You're never laughing with a ghost.

No one's like.

Why not?

Slimer, maybe.

Oh, there's definitely slimer.

Yeah.

Oh, boy.

There's a lot of in Ghostbusters.

There's plenty of very funny ghosts.

Mm-hmm.

I think that

he's saying that they're a subset of demons, right?

I mean, like,

that's kind of where he's coming down.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, I appreciate that.

I think that's the correct choice.

You can't have ghosts because that would suggest people are capable of saying fuck off to God, which you can't have.

It has narrative cleanness.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Now, let me ask you about psychics.

Oh, absolutely not.

So Lee doesn't like psychics.

Sure.

We know that Tucker should.

Tucker is a psychic.

Well, he's not.

He likes Alex.

Yes, exactly.

He's a psychic.

Yes.

So it's kind of surprising that they both fucking hate psychics.

Really?

Are you pro-psychic?

I'm anti-psychic.

Yeah.

Yeah, I am too.

Why are you anti-psychic?

Because the Bible says do not consult mediums.

Do not

consult psychics.

That's not.

That's very clear.

Multiple places in scripture.

Do not do it.

Oh, it, well, among the ancient Hebrews, that was a death penalty offense.

Exactly, it was.

Oh, man, this is bad news for Alex.

I'm confused.

About what?

We're.

Okay.

See, now I thought he was going to go with psychics are not real.

Oh.

I was a fool.

Yeah.

Because he's going with psychics are bad.

They're very real and bad because their powers are dangerous.

Right.

When Tucker says that it was a death penalty offense, he explains that it's like because it was so dangerous.

Right.

That these people

couldn't see the future.

Even if we wanted to use their knowledge, we had to destroy it.

Otherwise, it would have corrupted us.

Yeah.

And I guess...

I think that's what the minority report is about.

I don't see how he likes Alex.

This is Alex's whole thing.

I know.

It's almost like he makes it all up as he he goes along, and this is complete bullshit.

Almost.

But along the way, as they make up stuff,

Lee has what I would describe as a very interesting view on ghosts.

Okay.

We get back to the idea of like people who've been visited by their dead relatives.

All right.

And I think that this is so accidentally revealing.

Here's my concern.

So many times people have contact with these dead people, these are people that lived ungodly lives.

And yet they say, everything's fine.

I'm fine.

Everything's good.

Just take care of the family.

Tell everybody I love them.

I'm good.

Don't worry about me.

That's the general message people get.

Well, what does that say to someone who is thinking about what do I need to do to live a life that will bring me to heaven and to God?

Well, Uncle Tom came and told me he's fine.

He didn't, he was a, he was an adulterer and a, he never came to faith in Jesus.

He's a, you know, bad guy.

And yet he says he's fine in the afterlife.

Wouldn't that be something that a demon might want to imitate to send a false message?

I think maybe.

This is totally cool and empirical.

Maybe demons are trying to trick you by impersonating your dead loved ones.

This is a guy who applies rigor and critical thought to his beliefs and doesn't just shoot off from the hip.

This is the stupidest shit, but Lee accidentally revealed something about his psychology in that clip that I think is pretty damning.

Pardon the pun.

He's saying that a lot of these returning relatives were ungodly people, and they're coming back and saying that it's all good.

You don't have to be godly to have peace after death.

This is a crafty trick that demons are playing on you to get you to not be godly.

Buried in that statement is the understood but unspoken premise that no one wants to be religious.

It kind of sucks.

And if a ghost came back and told you that you didn't have to follow all these weird rules and you'd still be fine after you died, there's no reason why someone like Lee would continue doing it.

This is either Lee's perspective of himself or how he views the general religious people who are his audience.

Yeah.

The reason this is a problem for Lee is that God is love.

And even if a deadbeat relative came back as a ghost and told you that you didn't need to worship God, you should want to anyway, because it's good.

It's what powers you.

It's what gives you connection to others and the world.

And no dime store, blinky, pinky, inky, or Clyde is going to change that shit.

It's unfortunately a very revealing thing for Lee to express here because it's kind of the underpinning of this whole school of Christian apologetics.

This school of Christianity is built on arguing why people should be okay with being religious because they know that their version of Christianity sucks and a lot of their audience are just a couple bad days away from losing faith.

And then who's going to buy these dumb books about demons?

The struggle for me here is that sincerely, I don't hate Christians and I don't hate religious people, but this shit makes the position hard to defend.

Sure.

This stuff sucks.

Yeah.

This dude is fucking garbage and

I mean, but that's just showing it all over.

That's the problem.

That's the problem with the book, right?

Is that it doesn't mean

the same thing to everybody.

Right.

So if you put your same name under something that you believe completely different things about, then people are going to use that to exploit the differences.

They're going to use that.

That's true.

And the church has gone through tons of different characters over the, you know, the span of its existence.

And the one that is becoming ascendant and most prominent now sucks.

Yeah.

And it's like this.

I mean, like the...

But it's mostly a commercial enterprise.

Them being like, oh, can you believe the concept, the idea that people wouldn't have free will?

That was what you guys believed for a thousand years.

What are you talking about?

And you still kind of do.

Exactly.

So, wild.

I just,

I find this guy to be like, like I said, I think he seems pleasant in a lot of ways.

Yeah.

But also on a level, I think he's worse than Tucker.

Yeah.

I think Tucker sucks a whole lot.

Yeah.

But I think that...

Yeah, he's just...

There's a.

Whenever I was with these people, right, when I was growing up in the faith,

as is the phrase, right?

These were the type of people that fucking drove me insane because it was so obvious how stupid and awful this stuff is.

And it was so obvious that the other people that I was with in the church were fine.

Totally fine.

They were fine people.

Right?

They were just, they were just everybody.

But whenever they hear this in that same intonation and they're like, and they prayed all night, you can see their hearts like bubble up with

the truth.

There's something beautiful out there.

You know, it's the genre we like.

Right.

It's something that we like this.

We like hearing this.

Right.

And it's like, these are perfectly fine people, and you are fucking with them.

And you are fucked up for doing it.

Yeah.

And I think a lot of the people who, especially, I think,

maybe it's my experience because I was in a a lot of youth groups and stuff, but like, I think evangelical Christianity is like a particular thing where it's targeting youth.

Oh, it's ripe for abuse, yeah.

Well, but I don't even mean abusing youth, I mean, like, trying to look cool to youth.

And, like, someone like Lee Strobel and like the Christian apologetics, like, there is this tendency to be, like, hey, people might think you're a dork because you believe in God, but here's why you should,

why God is cool.

Yeah.

You know, like that's that God's not dead, that kind of vein of Christianity, that's meant to appeal to people who don't know that you're fucking with them.

I mean,

here's the one thing that always got me.

My dad,

and I'm putting his business on the streets here,

but he did the

$100,000 million dollar bills thing for a while.

You know, you tip a million-dollar bill with your like four bucks.

And it's got like,

oh, have you heard about Jesus?

He's worth a million dollars.

Right.

Yeah.

And it is, it is very much

like they don't understand it.

But if you needed to do that, there is no God.

If God can't handle his own business, if God needs you to trick people with poorly worded bills, you fucked up.

And odds are, like, the only people you're targeting with that

are going to be people who are like in in a bad place.

In a nigga, yeah.

They like it's going to be

a product of oh shit.

Yeah.

There's got there's gonna be something unhealthy that leads them.

There's no, there's no, it's one of those like, do the means justify the ends kind of thing where it's actually the means and the ends are the same.

If you are deceiving people to your God, your God is a deceiver.

It's the end.

You know?

And I think that that's a part of why I wanted to do this episode and why this stuck out to me was that like I feel like that distinction is really important.

And

I don't think that we need to or the impulse to be like

super anti-religion is healthy, but I get it.

I understand when people like this are ascendant and Tucker is doing an interview like this bullshit.

Yeah.

Like I get why people would be like, fuck this, fuck Christianity and all that.

I don't agree with that, but I get it.

Sure.

How can you not?

I mean, if this is your face, then.

How about we put it this way?

I understand where people are coming from, but I look at it as more like Dan Snyder owned the Washington Commanders now, I think is what they're called, when they used to be called what they used to be called.

And he's a gigantic piece of shit.

Everybody hates this fucking guy.

The name is awful.

The way he behaves is awful.

The fans need to rise up and get rid of the leadership because the Washington football team is fine.

Right?

The football team just plays football, man.

You're a fan of the football team.

Don't let the owner, like this fucker, tell you what to do.

Yeah, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with the team or the sport.

There's just something wrong with the branding, and

it's a problem that won't go away on its own.

It won't go away on its own.

And I think it requires people who care and people who have good intention as opposed to wanting to destroy.

No, take your Christianity back.

Yeah.

So, though there's miracles out there.

I doubt it.

No, what?

Yeah.

Do you know what a miracle is?

Yes, something that cannot happen.

Well, that's a good definition, but Lee's got a better one.

Okay.

Last question.

Miracles.

Yeah.

What is a miracle?

A miracle is an event brought about by the power of God that is a temporary exception to the ordinary course of nature for the purpose of showing that God has acted in history.

So, in other words, a lot of people got a nice definition of miracles.

That's from Robert Pertill, who was a philosopher.

I thought that was the best definition I'd heard.

That's a great definition of miracles.

Is it?

I'm going to offer my own.

Okay.

Crows, ghosts, the midnight coast, the wonders of the world, Mr.

Rees the most.

Just open up your mind and there ain't no way to ignore the miracles of every day.

It's a dark carnival.

Yes, it is.

That's what we're out here for.

Whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop.

Yeah, that's a better definition of miracles.

A lot of people, you know, they make fun of the magnets.

Yeah.

What have you?

Sure.

A lot of better lines of music.

Listen,

the magnets are rough.

We all accept that.

Because I was so mad at this dude and he's talking about miracles.

I ended up watching that music video and then watching a bunch of ICP music videos.

And I had a fucking depressing realization.

What?

You remember that song, Juggalo Island?

No.

We can let our nuts hang in the water.

No, I don't.

Juggalo Island.

Nope.

It was about Juggalo Island.

Sure.

Like, what if they had an island?

Naturally, I don't know.

I mean, they all hang out together.

I've already leapt to the end.

I will tell you what.

In a very short snippet, I have leapt to the conclusion.

Quite simple premise.

Yep.

That came out 15 years ago.

That made me so sad.

Oh, man.

Because it felt late.

It felt like late.

Yeah.

ICP.

Nope.

Nope.

Time flies

as it goes.

Yeah.

So we have one last clip here, and it's talking.

There's a point that Lee makes a couple of times, and I think it's a valid point.

Okay.

And that is that a lot of this stuff, like demons, angels, all this bullshit,

a lot of normal mainstream Christians don't want to get involved with it because they know it's crazy.

Yeah.

And they don't want to be treated like people who are running around hunting demons.

Yes, exactly.

And Tucker's like, then stop being Christians.

I accept it.

I think that's a fair argument.

Yeah, that's a fair argument.

I think we shy away because

we want to be accepted as normal.

Why do you get out of bed on Sunday to sit in a church where they're like pretending that nothing they say is true?

It's a good point.

If we believe, if it's not supernatural, why are you bothering?

It is a good point.

Jesus, you got to believe in angels.

You got to believe in demons.

You got to believe in Satan.

You got to believe in heaven.

You got to believe in hell.

Because if you believe in Jesus, he taught on all those things.

So my goodness, how could you not?

I agree with you.

How could you not?

Yeah, I mean, go on, move on to something else.

Yeah.

Go play tennis or something.

Hey, go play tennis.

Yeah.

That's literally what I did.

You love tennis.

So I think that

that clip,

I think that's a really good summation of this because it is expressing a belief that you also hold in many ways about religion.

True.

Like if you're looking at the text,

why are you doing something other than what the book says?

Yeah.

It's, it's, you are not doing the thing anymore.

You're doing something else.

Be yourself.

Be your own thing.

Right.

And in some ways, denominations of Christianity have achieved that goal, but you still use the same text.

Sure.

Whatever.

Yeah.

The reason that this is, you know,

a good parting is that, like,

this is Tucker and to a more jovial extent, Lee, expressing, we are not going to tolerate other Christianity within our Christianity.

Whereas in the past there was maybe a more tolerant

view in the mainstream.

The mainstream is going to be taken over by this.

And they're going to force out more tolerant Christian voices.

And

that's bad for the brand.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, for the longest time, they kind of tolerated these people because they were

an almost, they were like a remnant to the more magical times, you know, whenever men of faith walked the earth and moved mountains and all that kind of stuff.

But now,

you know, if you let them in and give them power, they're going to take over and they're not going to tolerate you.

It only goes one way.

I don't know, like, outside of this being kind of, you know, I mean, he's doing an interview on Tucker's show, but, like, I don't know how much much this is wildly out of sync with like, like, what Lee Strobel was doing 10 years ago.

It's what I was listening to when I was a kid.

Right.

It's Dr.

James Dobson shit.

Right, but it was confined to like church areas.

Exactly.

These books would just be on a bookstore, like Christian bookstores.

Yep.

And you wouldn't, you wouldn't.

I don't know.

You wouldn't see

demon interviews on Tucker.

People would read them and they would go, hmm, that's interesting.

And they would take little things that would be basically self-help.

It would be like, oh, yeah, I should clean more.

Like, that's what they would get out of it.

There would be the side excitement of being like, you should clean more for because God, you know, and that's that makes it more exciting.

Yeah.

This is not good.

No.

It's broken loose.

Yep.

It's gotten free.

And we are all going to be demons soon.

Yes, we are.

In their definitions.

That's what demons are for.

But you know what?

Until before that point comes.

Before the demon feast?

I'm going to get to work on MacGyver.

I'm going to watch some more MacGyver.

You'll have about 15 minutes at the end to solve everything.

Nice.

Yeah.

So yeah, I don't know.

Where are you at?

You know, I would have.

I like it whenever

if you've got a mythology that involves massive battles between heaven and hell, give me a little bit more than like, well, they don't have bodies.

What is that?

What are you talking about?

Then, what did they do?

They didn't marry.

Right.

But, I mean, so, like, essentially, what happened then is if you've already admitted that they have no bodies, no corporeal form, no aspect other than some sort of will.

We learn later they don't actually have wings, or at least not all of them.

Right, right, right, right.

So, then you're telling me also that there was a great moment where these angels were fired out of heaven, right?

Which also doesn't have a spot

or place.

Nope.

Right.

So, where did they go?

How did who forced them out?

How did they get, did God, like, kick them out individually?

Did he send them out with a bus?

Like, what are we talking about?

Right, exactly.

Like, what are we talking about where you've created this mythology and then the coolest parts are actually not possible to happen?

And why is it that the devil is fucking busy as hell, and all the demons seem to be able to do is trick you into thinking they know stuff?

It is so great.

Yeah.

Yep.

Anyway, we'll get back to maybe something a little more normal next time, but I want to take a little wacky break.

Clark Demons.

I loved it.

Yeah, it was a lot of fun.

So we'll be back.

But until then, we have a website.

Ooh, it's knowledgefight.com.

Yep.

We'll be back.

But until then, I'm Neo.

I'm Leo.

I'm DZX Clark.

I am the Mysterious Professor.

Woo, yeah, woo, yeah, woo.

And now here comes the sex robots.

Andy in Kansas, you're on the air.

Thanks for holding.

Hello, Alex.

I'm a first-time caller.

I'm a huge fan.

I love your work.

I love you.