Persuasiveness Matters

0:37 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler. And I'm still Wo. On today's Stone Choir we're going to be discussing persuasion. In the last number of months we've tackled a bunch of different so called controversial topics, subjects that you know the world takes a very different view than we take and responds to the views that we have shared on Stone Choir generally with hysteria. And we tackle those issues specifically because some of them are hard to hear. Some are probably hard for some of you to hear. And the point is that we wanted to be able to present a calm, reasoned case for these things, in part to make the point about the subjects, but also with every episode that we've done,

1:24 we're trying to demonstrate that you don't have to be a bomb throwing madman to agree with us about scripture being true, or about history being true, or about science being true. Truth is truth. And when faithful, honest men talk about the truth, they should be able to do that without getting worked up about it. So this week we're talking about persuasion specifically because you know last week we talked about not wanting people to get sucked down into the tar pit of okay, I'm red pilled now. I want to know all the red pill subjects and I want to engage in every so called conspiracy theory, and I know that they lied to me about something, so they must have lied about everything. This is now my personality.

2:08 When we tackle these subjects, we don't want people to feel like talking about race or the Jews or Hitler is your personality because it's not. It's the Ryan Gosling meme where the guy watches drive and then for the next eight years all of his relationships are defined by pretending to be somebody else. That it's fake. That's not it's not mature, it's not healthy. And we certainly don't want to be a part of anyone else going down that path on any of these subjects because we all have our lives, we're living in the community, we're doing whatever it is that God put us here to do and when you learn about something new, that's great. Today we're gonna talk about persuasion, because on one hand we don't

2:49 want you to fall into a trap of getting obsessed with stuff. Which is something that Corey and I are often accused, like, oh those guys are those are the race guys, those are the haters. We're not. And when someone listens they realize that, but if you only listen to the slander about us instead of listening to us, you'll believe that you know it's it's only crazy people who think these things. When you're clear reasoned arguments, like, okay, well that that makes sense, even if you disagree. And so today we want to talk about how to be persuasive as you're tackling some of these subjects. You know, Dale Carnegie with Winning Friends and Influencing People and the Dilbert guy, uh, Scott Adams, he's talked a lot about persuasion.

3:35 We're not trying to jump into that sort of big brain TED talk world where here's how you make people like you more. The specific point that we hope to get across in today's episode is that if and when you choose to engage in some of the subjects that we discuss, there are certain things you can do if you're not thinking that will turn people off completely to what it is you're trying to convince them of. And there's certain things you can do that will be persuasive. It's this is just basic adult human stuff. There's a good way and there's a bad way to do anything. And there's no particular script for how to do it well in every single situation. Every individual is different. You're different than we are.

4:20 Your family is different than you are. You have more similarities with your family than probably with us. You have more similarities with us than you have with someone on the other side of the world. So they're varying degrees of familiarity and all those have to be incorporated into how we discuss things. One of the things that made us think about doing this episode is that when we did last week's we were talking about conspiracy theories, somebody on Twitter replied and said, you know, basically he was a a fan of the show and he always looked forward to what we put out, but he said last week's show wasn't our best work. And I appreciated that comment because it was it was critical, you know, it was he wasn't being nasty, but it made me think.

4:57 It made me think specifically why do we select some of the topics that we select? Why would it be that someone would hear last week's episode and think, Yeah, that wasn't really for me, that wasn't great. Maybe it was right, maybe it was a crap episode and it wasn't suitable for anyone. Almost immediately after we got a ton of feedback from other people saying, thank you so much for this episode. I loved it, it was really important. And I realized that one of the reasons for that disparity, it wasn't that like the guy who said that has bad taste or something, he had never dealt with probably I I didn't ask, but assume, he never dealt with the problems that we were addressing in that episode.

5:34 There are a lot of people, especially in the dissident right, who go completely nuts for so-called conspiracy theories. Like I said, it becomes their personality. And if you talk to one of those guys, you can't help but hearing about that stuff, even if you want to talk about something completely different. And so I realize that one of the things that Corey and I do when we tackle subjects is every episode is not for every listener. That's not to be dismissive. It's just that we're trying to tackle a specific issue in hopes that you know eventually in a perfect world everyone would get on the same page. So if you hear something like that's not really for me, it's fine if you don't like the episode.

6:13 But I realized when he said that that especially in light of all the other people saying, Yeah, those are really valuable episodes. I realized that there are people that just don't have certain problems. And so when if we do an episode and you're like that doesn't have anything to do with me, I'm not saying you should just like every episode. If someone says something and it doesn't make sense to you and we're telling you, this is a big problem in the world. Like conspiracy theory obsession is a problem in the world, especially on the right. So when we say, hey, here's a really important thing to deal with, and someone's like, that doesn't have anything to do with me, hey, thank God that you've been spared that.

6:55 But B, be aware that there are people who are actually being significantly burdened by confusion and disorientation and obsession in some cases about a about a subject that thankfully you've been spared. And that's kind of the case with a lot of our episodes. You know, some people you know, there some people in certain denominations when we talked about slavery, like, Yeah, that's fine. You know, maybe it's not exactly what I've I've heard in church, but that's consistent with a scriptural approach, and then there are other people who completely freak out because they've never heard anything except for the modern strictly moral anti slavery views that have only existed in the last century and a half.

7:34 So one of the things about being persuasive is is really knowing your audience. In our case, as podcasters, we have a generic audience. It's entirely opt-in But we don't know you. We don't know you personally. We don't know what your interests are, your concerns are. So obviously we can't address every episode to each person listening individually. So when you think that there's a miss on something, just think about maybe the fact that there are other people out there that are dealing with something that you've been spared. You know, be thankful for that, but also be aware of it. Cause if we take the time to devote an entire week to something, it's because we see enough in the world, we haven't you

8:13 know enough people commenting to us, DMing us. We've seen enough struggle that we're saying this is something affecting others. And when we talk about being persuasive, that's part of it, knowing that my problems are not necessarily your problems. You know, the worst thing that's ever happened to me is going to be different in degree than the worst thing that's ever happened to each person listening. You know, there's some people who may maybe you have a horse girl where she has she's rich, daddy's rich, and the worst thing that's ever happened to her in her life, she's never lost friends or family, but her dad had to sell her horse and she was bereft. That was the worst thing that ever happened to her.

8:53 I think we have a tendency to look at someone, you know, like that in the hypothetical and be completely unsympathetic and say, oh you spoiled little brat, how dare you complain about this when my problems are XYZ worse than that? The sympathetic approach is to look at that and to empathize, to realize that that was the worst day in that girl's life if the horse that she dearly loved got sold, you know, for whatever reason and that was cause of heartbreak, she's heartbroken. It's the worst thing that ever happened to her. I think that we can approach things as we're trying to be persuasive and just trying to discuss things with people to some degree by putting ourselves in their shoes. Because if something is really hurting someone else and it doesn't bother

9:39 you at all, you have to you have to keep that in mind when you're interacting with them. And certainly don't dismiss whatever's concerning them. Because even if their concerns are dumb or wrong, it's still what's concerning them. And you can find common ground simply in the fact that you yourself have concerns. There are things that burden you, things that frighten you, things that confuse you. And so if the only commonality that you have with the person you're talking to is that you share having had a bad day, that's still a place to begin. And so I think as we begin talking about persuasion, finding common ground is one of the most crucial elements. So I think at the outset it's important to distinguish between two distinct

10:20 things that are both really in this area we're discussing in this episode. The first is persuasion, which is what we are discussing properly. How do you persuade someone of something? What is persuasion? And the second is manipulation. There's a distinction between these. We are not talking about manipulation. Some of the psychology or things like that would get into manipulation where you're talking about propaganda in the negative sense, and we'll get into that later in the episode as well. But for our purposes here, persuasion is attempting to convince someone of something by engaging with that person. So you're engaging that person's reason or emotions. It's not always wrong to engage the emotions.

11:07 God gave you emotions for a reason. You don't totally ignore them. Yes, when you're dealing with something that is a purely logical problem, you set your emotions aside, it's important to be able to do that, particularly for men. But it's not wrong to engage the emotions of another person per se. That can be used to manipulate, of course. But the distinction is that manipulation is an attempt to circumvent or subvert to take advantage of the other person in some way. So you're trying to befuddle the person, confuse the person, engage with emotions that aren't really at issue here in order to manipulate the outcome. So it's the difference basically in in intent. There's some difference in means as well, but largely it's the intent.

11:57 Persuasion you want to bring the person to one would think your position through convincing the person, engaging with that person's reason, engaging with that person's emotions, engaging with that person's thoughts, etc. Whereas with manipulation, again, you are attempting to subvert or control. Now, manipulation technically is not an inherently negative term. Because manipulation also has the sense of just doing Of just doing something skillfully, because it just comes from Latin manipulus, which is the Latin for handful, it has to do with the hands, and the hands are obviously dexterous, as it were. However, in modern English, manipulation has taken off that negative connotation. So here we'll just contrast those two: persuasion being what we are

12:49 discussing, manipulation being sort of the shadow version of it, the dark version of it, not what we are advocating. And as well mentioned, we're not going to get into the psychology of, you know, if you want to convince someone do these four things in this order yes, we could get into that, but that's not the point here. The point of the episode is how do you engage with other people in a meaningful way on these topics? And how do you choose when to engage? Because that's part of it. As Wo mentioned, you don't just always go one hundred percent on every single one of these issues. Yes, you've listened to the episodes on race and World War two That doesn't mean that the first thing you say when you sit

13:40 down to have a beer with someone is so, how about racial IQ? You don't open that way. Mean maybe if it's with your friends and it's a joke, fine, but you have to know your audience. You have to know where you are as well, and how to engage with that audience in that place. And so as was mentioned, we don't know our audience personally. Of course we know some of you personally, but we generally don't know the overwhelming majority of our audience personally. So what we are doing here is necessarily more general than what you would be doing with someone in person or what we would do with someone in person. Woe was just on the myth of the twentieth century, and there he is engaging personally with someone.

14:28 So that's different from how you would engage, say, on this podcast with the audience. With each other, we can engage personally, we know each other. But with the audience, it has to be more general. So the first thing you want to do when you're going to persuade someone is just to know the other person. Start with an actual conversation with the person. You don't have to open up with politics and religion and theology You can open with a general discussion. You're building a relationship, building rapport to some degree, and that is going to count toward whether or not that person will give any weight to what you say later, if you just open up cold open with so about the World War two yeah probably not going to get you

15:18 anywhere. That's Part of why people like the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons, when they do the cold call at your front door, they typically don't get anywhere with that. Now, maybe over time they can wear certain people down. But if you have a relationship with someone, you have an established rapport, you're going to be more successful in persuading that person. So that first part is just getting to know your audience, knowing your audience. And that goes back to something that we've discussed in the past, the basic question, what problem were you trying to solve? And I think something that I hope that people in our audience will keep in mind is that if you learn something new, maybe it's from Stone Choir, maybe it's somewhere else, and it's a really

16:07 big deal to you, like it revolutionizes some aspect of how you view the world, you're probably going to be excited about that. Like, this is cool. Like, this opens on new horizons. This explains things that I never understood before. I'm energized. I have this new knowledge. And you want to share it. The question of what problem are you trying to solve when you're looking to persuade people in your own life is that I think the mistake that many people make in interpersonal discussions is suddenly the problem you want to solve with your friends or God forbid your family is a oh they're not wet red pilled. I need to go lecture them about these things that I know about and that they're wrong about, and I need to fix them.

16:51 That is exactly the wrong approach. If you approach wanting to discuss a subject in terms of I need to fix you, it's revolting. Yeah, we did an episode, a five-part episode on race, three-part episode on Jews. Between those, it was probably close to twenty hours of content. As Corey mentioned, you know, people knocking on doors for for these cults. If I showed up on your door and said, hey, I'm here to talk to you about race for three hours, you're gonna chase me off. Even if you happen to like me, you're not gonna want to hear it. There's a blessed passivity to things like podcasts and articles that you can share with other people because it's completely one-sided. You can pick up an article or maybe a book or a

17:34 podcast episode and you can listen or read, engage in your own time on your own terms. If you don't like it, you can just walk away. If we say something in one of our episodes that rubs you the wrong way, like I gotta put this down, it's it's annoying or whatever, you can't and you don't have to chase us off to do it because we don't know who you are. We're never there's never any mutual engagement there. So we can make a case for something in this sort of passive teaching environment that's different fundamentally than the way you can make a case to someone you know personally. And so the very thing that we can do quite successfully on a podcast where take it or leave it, you can listen or

18:15 not, it would be virtually impossible to do this in person to strangers, even though virtually all of you s are strangers to us. The fact that we're not coming to you and trying to convince you is part of what makes it easy for you to listen. And I think one of the keys for us to understand as we're engaging interpersonally is that one of the things that we say all the time, I particularly say a lot here, and I actually said on the myth of the 20th century this past week, I don't care if anyone agrees with me. And Adam on the the other show thankfully got me to clarify, I didn't mean that I'm completely indifferent to people believing these things. What I was talking about and what I say on this podcast

18:55 frequently is I am completely outcome independent to how you receive this information. Yes, Cory and I are spending you know probably about 30 hours a week on some of the easier episodes preparing and delivering this stuff to you. And so there's clearly investment. We wouldn't be doing this if no one were listening and we thought no one cared. When I say I don't care, what I mean is that if you as an individual who's completely unknown to me, don't agree with the thing that we just told you Told you. That's okay. We frequently say take it or leave it. There are a lot of episodes where we explicitly say don't take our word for it. Don't listen to a couple of podcasters tell you stuff that's completely

19:36 contrary to everything you've ever heard. That should rightly raise your hackles. I use that phrase frequently. We have a natural basic animal understanding of something being off and the instinctual response to off is to be protective, and that's fine, that's good. The reason that Corey and I can say it's fine if you don't believe us, go look for yourself, is that we know that we're telling you the truth. And so our confidence in the subjects that we discuss is based on the fact that we know they're true. We've done all the legwork long before we come to the microphone and deliver one of these episodes. So when I say I don't care and I say, you know, you can take it or leave it, it's not that I don't

20:19 want you to believe or I don't I'm indifferent. It's that if you say that's crap, I don't believe any of it, there's no skin off my nose. It doesn't hurt me if you don't agree. And while that's easy in an impersonal situation like a podcast, I think the vital thing that one of the key things I hope people will take away from this episode is that it's okay to have a sense of that same spirit in person with your friends, with your family. And one of the big turnoffs when when you want to talk about a subject is when it's just the most important thing in the world for you to talk about it. If you're just brimming with excitement to tell something about somebody about something, maybe the best approach, you know, depend it depends on your

21:03 relationship. Maybe you have a relationship where your friends are just used to you getting excited about stuff and they'll humor you. But Sometimes for some people, depending on their personalities and their friends, if you're brimming with excitement to share something you just learned, maybe the best thing is to wait and to say nothing and to let it naturally come up in conversation. So you've been informed, you've learned about something, you really want to share details, but you don't want to be this guy who's just wild-eyed about convincing other people. Sometimes the best way to be convincing is to completely relax and just forget about it. And then later on, you know, maybe months down the road, some,

21:44 you know, say race or IQ comes up. You now have something you can contribute to the conversation that's going to be novel to your circle of friends because you know they're not listening. They haven't heard this stuff before. You can drop a few facts in conversation that are probably going to blow their minds. And you know, maybe they'll get really mad at you, like some people get mad at us. Maybe they'll pique their curiosity. The nice thing about having resources like books and articles and podcasts to point people to is that you don't have to have the personal investment to say you must believe and listen to this thing right away. This is the most important thing. You can say, you know what, I heard something really interesting.

22:20 Listen to this episode. Tell me all you think. I I found it curious. I was I was really interested by what they had to say. You can be non-committal, but curious, and that doesn't put pressure on the other person to have to just sell, yeah, you're absolutely right. Those guys make complete sense. Maybe they're going to respond very negatively. And so one of the reasons that Corey and I created Stone Choir is that we can we can take the heat for you. We can be the the crazy men screaming into the void on the internet. And then if a few people come along in here and say, Yeah, that makes sense, then you can have a conversation with your friend in your own particular context in a way that you know

22:58 we've delivered the the scary payload and then you can work with whatever bits of pieces and add your own and you know, say you disagree with something we said and agree with something else, but you can take the pressure off of yourself and off of your friends and family if you say, hey, here's something somebody else is doing. We've had a lot of feedback recently. Yeah, I mentioned it to Adam on Myth of the Twentieth Century that a number of people have said wives and girlfriends have started listening. And I realized that for saying that it might to to individuals who said that it might seem a little doxy. Any wives and girlfriends who are listening, I want you to know that we've heard that dozens of times in the last couple weeks.

23:34 So you should assume if you were one of those wives and girl or girlfriends, hopefully not both, that or mothers in some cases, it's not the man in your life that we're talking about, it's somebody else because there have been a bunch of people. So it's it's kind of a firing squad where there's a blank. Assume that the guy that you th your your boyfriend or husband who told you to watch, he's not the one who DM'd us 'cause like we don't people feel like there's a conspiracy to trick you into believing things. That's precisely the opposite intent of what we have. Here's some stuff, take it or leave it. We think there's some value here. That's an approach that when we take it into personally, it becomes

24:09 very convincing just because the guy's relaxed. He's not freaking out. there's inherent skepticism when anyone delivers new information. And if they deliver it in a way that's wild-eyed and like wants to grab you by the lapels and shake you and say you must believe this. My first response is no, I want no part in that. So we want to make sure that we don't come across that way and we don't just naturally like that's not my personality or Cordy's personality. But the same can also be even more effective in person. Just say, hey, there's this cool thing I learned about. What do you think about it? And ask that way. Don't say you must believe this. Say, here's an interesting article. Here's an interesting podcast.

24:50 What do you think about this? And then use it as a springboard for your own discussion to think what you think about the thing. Doesn't mean it doesn't need to be to mirror what some stranger on the internet told you. What do you think about the thing? How do you think it affects your life? Then it becomes personal. It doesn't become here's a religious tenant of this new big red pill discovery I have. It's just, huh, I think this is a fact and I think it has this to do with life and I think that's relevant. What do you think? That can be an interesting human conversation at a small scale where there's no hard feelings. If they if they if they say that's racist, that's dumb. You can just laugh and say, well, I I think everything gets

25:32 called racist at this at this point, so I don't think that matters. Oh, by the way, those guys did an entire episode on the invention of racism in the 20th century, you know, maybe find out what the word that you're using actually means. And then again, you can blame someone else if they disagree. You don't have to you don't have to fight. We don't want people fighting with each other or straining relationships for the sake of things that even though they do have impact on all of our lives, it's not immediately obvious. And so the the immediacy of the need is really what this part is about. There's no immediate need for the person you're talking to to agree with you. Just as there's no immediate need for you to agree with us,

26:12 you can listen to an episode and say, Yeah, I don't get that. That's dumb or it's crazy or whatever. That's fine. Maybe you come back to it later, maybe you completely forget about it and never care. That's perfectly okay. If you take that approach with your friends and family, you can still have normal human relationships with them, even while you're incorporating new things that you've learned into your your life and and maybe your conversations. But don't make it the determining factor for whether or not you're going to be friends with your friends, or certainly whether you're gonna have a loving relationship with family. None of these things should ever undermine those things as far as it depends on

26:50 you. You touched on a couple of things there that I want to expand, but first I guess I really should give an example of manipulation not being a negative thing, because I did say that and some maybe have not encountered that. One of the best and most obvious examples in is interacting with a small child, particularly one who is being cantankerous or Uncooperative for some reason, maybe he doesn't want to put on his shoes. A neat little trick, if you've never done this with children, I highly recommend you use this, is instead of saying would you like to do something? Or if you do this then we'll give him two options, both of which are acceptable to you. So for instance, if your child is not picking what he wants

27:37 to eat for lunch or he's just being difficult with eating his lunch. Say, would you rather have carrots or broccoli? Assuming he'll actually eat either of those. Most children, when given the option of two things, will pick one. Yes, eventually they get old enough to figure out your trick and go no, I want candy. But for a while it works. And that's manipulation. That's not negative. You're actually being a parent or an uncle or whatever you happen to be with relation to this child. You're doing your duty, and yes, you're manipulating the child to do it, but that's a positive. You're doing it for a good reason in a good way. But then the two things on which I wanted to expand, first you touched tangentially on the fact that human beings are hardwired to

28:31 process things negatively more so than positively. This is just an important psychological and biological fact about humanity, and the reason for it is fairly obvious if you think about it. If you are walking through the woods, and you hear some strange noise, and you decide, Yep, that must be a bear or wolf, I am going to go the other direction. You're probably going to survive whatever that encounter is. Unless you're being actively stalked by something, in which case, you're still more aware, your odds go up. If on the other hand, you are the person who just says, Oh, must be a squirrel, and just keeps walking, you put a positive spin on it, you are more likely to be eaten by something and not survive.

29:19 And so evolutionarily, and I do mean in the micro sense, the minor sense, not speciation, I'm not talking about that. And as Christians, yes, we can say that evolution in the micro sense is true. We know that. That's why we have different dogs, why we have different races of men. But when it comes down to it, we are hardwired for a negative interpretation of novel information. Unless we have reason, good reason, to put a positive spin on it. So this goes back to that building of a relationship. If you are speaking with someone whom you trust, and that person gives you novel information, you don't necessarily have to put the negative spin on it that you otherwise would because you trust the source.

30:10 For instance, if we go back to the example of being out in the woods, if you're wandering through the woods and you find a random mushroom and pick it up, unless you're a crazy person, you're not going to just eat the random mushroom if you don't know what it is. However, if you're walking through the woods hiking with your friend who knows mushrooms really well and he hands you a mushroom, you're more likely to maybe try that. So it it matters that relationship you have, and it's important to bear in mind Bear in mind that we are all, to various degrees, of course, hardwired to put a negative spin on novel information. At least if we haven't become completely credulous and we believe everything

30:53 we hear, which is the opposite problem. But then I I really already touched on the second point I wanted to make to expand on the issue of trust and that's just that's vital to all of this. Whether or not the audience trusts you. Whether or not the person with whom you're speaking can trust the things you say. And that's built over time. Trust takes time to build. It can be destroyed in seconds, which is always important to bear in mind, but it takes time to build. And that is fundamentally one of the things that we are doing on this podcast. It's why we don't mislead on anything. Whether or not you want to hear it, whether or not it is going to be necessarily good for us to say it, whatever

31:42 the consequences may be, if it's true, we're going to say it. Now, we may endeavor to say it in a way that is persuasive, hence why we are doing this episode, and it wouldn't make much sense if we deliberately produced episodes in a way that was not persuasive, but we are not going to subvert the facts or the truth in order to be persuasive. That veers into manipulation. Because part of the reason we can be effective, part of the reason you can share these episodes with others and actually have people listen and perhaps believe the things we say is because of that building of trust, the fact that we are going to tell the truth about every single topic that comes up on this on this podcast. Because building that trust over time is vitally important.

32:37 And all it takes is lying on one topic or about one facet of a topic. And it destroys that trust. Because then people, when they listen to you, if they know in the past you've lied about something particularly particularly something important, then they're going to wonder if you're lying every time. Now that eventually attenuates to some degree over time. So if you lied to someone ten years ago about something, and you have been truthful since, that's largely in the past. But it can take years. So it is important to maintain that trust you have with others if you are going to attempt to be persuasive with those those others. And on the subject of lying, it's important again to distinguish between

33:26 if we were to deceive for the purpose of advancing one of our points and if we simply got something factually wrong. We endeavored at great lengths not to let that happen. We're not perfect. We may misspeak, or we m we may inadvertently misconstrue something, it's not going to be something that's a key part of a point. But we're not saying if anyone ever makes any mistakes in their entire life you write them off, because that's that's insane. No one can survive that. But again, it's the deception. You know, we talked last week about some of the people engaging in some of these clear deceptions where it's clear that they're you know whether they're grifters or they're just being entertaining, they're willing to

34:08 fill people's heads full of lies for the sake of entertainment. And who knows what they get out of that doesn't matter. That's fundamentally different from just misspeaking or or accidentally mistaking something. Yeah, for example, when I was a myth of the twentieth century is after I I normally go to sleep. And so when I'm extremely tired, my reason, my faculties are fully intact, but my recall just goes in the toilet. So a couple times I completely flubbed some timeline stuff. And like, you know, if you I I practically had Moses landing on the moon, I was getting some of the timelines still wrong. That doesn't discredit what I said because like I acknowledged it at the time, but the overall point I was making wasn't hinging on

34:52 that. And I think it's okay for you like try to get things straight before you say them as as we do. But if you make a mistake, don't be terrified of that either. that's human to to misspeak or to accidentally get something wrong. If you find that you've made an error in something factually actually go back and fix it. On the related note of you know outcome independence and convincing people over time, I think time is a key part of this. Yeah, when we do an episode, we lay it down and then move on, and we'll refer it often to previous episodes and in newer ones as we're doing in this one. For example, one of the early episodes we did on framing, this is really a continuation of that. In the framing episode, we focused entirely on the use of frame

35:40 in persuasion or deception. So this is kind of a continuation of that metacognition aspect of things. You know, this is this is a meta episode where we're talking about thinking about talking about things. Which is most people don't normally approach things that way. We're willing to do that, even though it's you know it's kind of a lull episode in terms of here's not a ton of new facts. It's just we've been delivering so many facts over the last number of months that are really hard to swallow in some cases for some people. We want to just give people a little bit of time to digest and then figure out how to incorporate it themselves. I want to give a a personal example of this, just kind of demonstrate.

36:20 Like we we don't want to make this about us, but on this podcast, we are the frame of reference for everything. So as you're listening, you know, you can apply what we're saying about ourselves in your own lives. I don't want you thinking about us. I want you thinking about yourself and how you can live a better Christian life speaking faithfully in your community. So just pointing to our example is not intended to be self-aggrandizing. It's literally just here's something that happened and maybe you can learn something from it. I was on Gab for a year or so. Um I prior to that I had engaged before I got on Gab for for good after I finally got expelled from Twitter for the last time. I had engaged with the Andrew Torbon Gab and I eventually gave

37:01 him a whole rash of crap because of some of his hiring practices. I was pretty antagonistic about him openly and he blocked me and like I don't blame him. I was I was ankle blowing on his timeline. And I was right incidentally about his hiring practices. He and he turned out later on to regret some of those people. But we began with kind of a strained relationship and then I got on Gab and he gave me a second chance and eventually he started boosting some of the things that I said and I appreciated that because I had shifted focus more than you know, in twenty seventeen versus twenty twenty. And I can't remember the ty I think it was it was either the end of twenty nineteen or twenty twenty was I think it

37:42 was probably twenty twenty when I was invited by Andrew to do an essay on Christian nationalism. It was one of the earliest things that news.gab had been, they'd just begun sort of highlighting writers from the community, uh Boniface Option was one of the first guys he had and he had a few others, but I was one of the very first and I was almost the first to be invited to discuss anything about Christian nationalism. Now the episode that Corey and I did on Christian nationalism earlier this year was a much more fully fleshed out version of what I gave to Andrew. And the reason I'm highlighting this example is that when I was invited to do that, both Andrew and I knew like we never we've never had pr private personal conversations about any of this stuff

38:29 I can just tell like by reading the room, reading the audience, even if it's an audience of man, one, if it's another man you're interacting with. It was clear to both of it at the time that I was further to the right on things like race and and capital and nationalism than he was. And so when he invited me to write on Christian nationalism, I knew at that time that if I were to make the fully racialist case for the subject that we made on Stone Choir, he wasn't going to publish it. Because at the time at least those were not his views. And so I didn't be antagonistic. It was an honor to be asked to do anything about a subject that was important to me. So I think we'll link in the show notes the essay that

39:10 I did on Christian nationalism. So you can take a look at it if you're interested, and maybe contrast it with some of the things that we say on this episode, I bring this up because it's an example of being patient in your persuasion. I could have done a couple different things when Andrew came to me. I c I could have fought him and said, Well, I'm only gonna write for you if I get to make the completely racial case for what nations are, and I'm going to say that America is a whites-only country, and that's going to be the point. If I had done that, he would have flat out said no. I knew that, and so I didn't. I wasn't gonna be antagonistic. Again, there when you look at the essay, everything that I say

39:50 is entirely true. I was not being deceptive about what I said. However, I I omitted a big chunk of the argument for Christian nationalism by basically just focusing on the Christian part. I talked about the history, I talked about you know the state of of the West of Christendom and then the United States in terms of Christianity and a Christian government, I almost completely omitted any discussion of race because again, I knew it wouldn't be welcome. I knew that it would be too far at that time. So that was an example in my mind of trying to be effectively persuasive. I did make the case for Christian nationalism on the Christian side. And there's absolutely a case to be made there. Here's what Christian nations look like.

40:35 I completely omitted any discussion of what nation means, which is again the other half of the conversation. And I did that because I knew it wouldn't be welcome. A few years on, he's saying many of the same things now publicly that I was saying then. Things that I I you know, again I haven't talked to him, but just based on the other things going on at the time, I knew they wouldn't be welcome. And so rather than picking a fight with a guy with whom I'd already fought in the past, like, you know, we got over it, whatever. I chose to bite my tongue and to make the narrow case that I could make that we could both agree on. I, you know, I not to say the endorsed a hundred percent of what I said, but he was willing to publish it pretty

41:15 much as is. So like I didn't I didn't push any buttons that were going to alienate the people he wanted to reach at the time. That's persuasion. You can make part of the case even knowing that you have other stuff to say. So what is that what does this have to do with you personally? You don't have to say it all at once. It's fine to just get one or two things out on the table and let people digest it. You know, a lot of the things that m my s my friends and I were saying on Gab at the time are things that now Andrew is much more willing to say in public. I don't think he believed in them. He's more willing to say them now because he realized that we were right. I'm not I'm certainly not taking personal credit for whatever to whatever

41:56 degree he was persuaded by anything. I'm simply pointing out the fact that if instead of doing what I did, if I had been antagonistic, if I had said, unless we go whole hog and do everything that I want us to say, I don't want any part of it. If you're an aggravating friend, if you're an aggravating ally to someone, that's a turn off to whatever it is you're trying to convey. If I have a point to make, I want to make it as gently and persuasively as possible. It's funny for me to say gently because I think a lot of people assume that Corey and I are bomb throwers. You know, we're we're bulls in a china shop just storming through everything that's going on and just leaving wreckage in our wake.

42:36 That's not the case. But if you're not giving us a charitable view, particularly if you're just looking at social media, some people conclude that. Most of that frankly is reputational. It's not things that I've done. It's things that people have said about me. And so, you know, whatever. If I have to worry about what people are thinking about me, it's a complete waste of time. I worry about people getting these subjects right. And so when I was offered the opportunity to make a case for Christian nationalism, I did the best I could in the constraints that I had at the time. And then when Corey and I had our own platform here on Stone Choir to make a more fleshed out case, particularly for the

43:16 nation side, the racial side of Christian nationalism, we made it here. And we made it, you know, in public and in a way that people who maybe read part of it, you know, before they've heard it elsewhere, they can come along at their own pace. I think that's another key element of this. Let people come along at their own pace. Because you're not trying to fix them. I wasn't trying to fix Andrew or anyone else. I was just trying to tell the truth. And if there's only a portion of it that they can receive and absorb, it's important to know that and to leave the rest out. Because if I can give you, you know, one dish that you're really gonna like and another dish that I know you're gonna hate, if the goal is for me to get you to eat

43:56 a dish, I'll give you the one you're gonna like. I can save the you know, save the broccoli for later. Give you the carrots. That's That's perfectly fine. We get so excited about trying to convince people and trying to fix them that we forget that, you know, in many cases we didn't believe this stuff a few years ago. So just be patient, show some grace, and give people a chance to come along at their own pace and leave them as r much room as you can, you know, tell them a truth where you can find common ground and push them a little bit. Give them a little bit more than they're comfortable with. Give them something to think about. But if you try to just waterboard someone and and put it down their throat all at once,

44:33 you're you're going to alienate them even with the truth because the manner in which it's presented is so much worse that who cares what the content is if you're aggravating, it's people don't want anything to do with you. Be patient, have low time preference. We talk about this all the time in in the racial space. There are certain races that have higher or lower time preference. They're more focused on the future or the current. And we must be patient. We must be focused on the future. And knowing telling something to someone that's hard to hear, it's probably going to take some time. It might have taken you time to absorb it. It's going to take them maybe even more time because you have a certain set of givens and experiences.

45:18 Theirs are different. If it takes them twice as long as you, just let it happen. Give 'em a little bit, give them what they can digest, and then wait. And be willing to answer questions in a way that's not challenging, that doesn't make them feel like you think there's something wrong with them that they don't agree with you. Just give it time. Be patient. So you're saying that time preference actually matters? it tr matters tremendously. And in the same people who think that you know the whites have super low time preference and we're just the masters of of patience. As soon as we learn something new, we go nuts and like, oh, I gotta tell everyone right away. It's good to be excited. It's bad to make other people regret y being in the same

46:01 room with you. I was actually just discussing something tangentially related to this with someone last night. When you're building an argument, you may very well have to build the argument in pieces. And there's a tendency for some when it comes to politics or religion, these hot button issues, as it were, to attempt to get someone to believe everything all at once. And that's just not how things work. That's particularly not how human beings work. It to some degree, beliefs and things like that, very few people are going to turn on a dime and go from believing one thing to believing the diametrically opposed thing. Usually how it works is more akin to Bayesian updating, which essentially is just a fancy way of saying that as additional information comes

46:55 in, the person slowly moves with regard to what he believes about the issue. And so over time, you may get someone to change his position on something. You're probably not going to get that in one discussion, in one conversation. With most people, some men, yes, if you present a strong enough case, they'll say, I was wrong previously. I now believe this. You may encounter some men like that. Not many. Most people take time to change their views, particularly on important things. And the context in which I was discussing this with the aforementioned person was basically apologetics. How do you prove the Christian God is the true God? I'm not going to go into apologetics in depth in this episode

47:46 because I'm sure eventually we'll get around to probably a series of episodes on apologetics different arguments for God and things like that. But the core point that I want to draw out of that is that when you're building the argument for the Christian God, you don't start by arguing for the Christian God. Particularly if you're dealing with an atheist or an agnostic, if you're dealing with someone who doesn't even believe in God, you don't start by saying, Jesus is your Lord and Savior, period. That's not going to get you anywhere the person is going to stop listening and probably walk away. And probably also be quite annoyed with you and perhaps not listen to you again. Instead, if you're building up, you build up to that argument by

48:34 establishing more basic facts, by laying the groundwork, building a foundation, and you do that by establishing, well, there's something other than matter. Okay, if there's something other than matter, the universe is not purely material, it's not a materialistic universe. We have to explain this thing that isn't matter. And then you can get into proving that the necessity of the infinite. Then you can prove that the infinite is personal. The infinite being personal must be God. And then you can move on from there and build up and build your argument piece by piece and arrive at the conclusion that the Christian God is the only explanation for the information presented. But that takes time, that takes patience, that takes i multiple interactions

49:27 with this person. You're probably not going to go through all of this in one marathon session. Maybe you will, maybe you happen to be the kind of person who enjoys that, and if the other person also does, then by all means talk about it for six hours. But typically speaking, it is going to take many interactions over a course of days or weeks, months, even years. I have friends where I have discussed religion and these issues for years with these people. They've slowly changed their position, but it takes time. And some are more resistant to change than others. My My father has a friend that he has had for I want to say 30 years almost who recently became a Christian after my father had been discussing religion with him for thirty years,

50:22 patience matters. These things, when they're these very important things, are going to be in large part in God's time. That doesn't mean don't play your role, do your part. Of course do that, that's your duty as a Christian. But be patient. Recognize that a lot of these things are to some degree out of your hand. We're advising you to be effective and to be wise as a serpent when it comes to the things that are in your hands, the things that are in your control. Don't worry about the things that aren't the There was one time when Martin Luther was asked why he wasn't more worried about the state of Christian knowledge amongst supposed Christians and just the general state of Christendom. And his response was that he put in the work, and the

51:17 outcome was in God's hands, and so he could enjoy his beer with Melanchthon. That's the right perspective to have on these things. And that's why that outcome independence that was mentioned earlier matters. Do the thing because it is the thing you should do, not because it guarantees a result. Because when it comes to human beings, the result is almost never guaranteed. Particularly when you're dealing with persuasion, you're dealing with psychology. You're dealing with things that are very much beyond your control. You can influence these things. You cannot really control them. So you can make the persuasive argument, you can properly engage with other people, but if you become obsessed with the outcome, you're actually

52:08 going to harm your chances of arriving there because you're going to be obnoxious. If you're constantly insisting, no, you absolutely must believe this specific conclusion. And yes, I that's sort of what social media and certain fora tend to encourage. That it brings it out of a certain personality type. I willingly admit that I engage in some of that sometimes. But there's a time and a place. Engaging on Twitter again, general audience you probably don't know most of those people personally. You're going to engage differently from how you engage with a family member or a close friend, or someone you met at a bar, stranger, what have you. So, know your audience. When you know your audience, and you aren't so hyper focused on

53:01 the outcome that you can just be a person and have a conversation You are going to be so much more effective than if you are just hyper laser focused on that outcome and driving people away because you're being abrasive. If you're being abrasive or obnoxious you are going to be less effective. That's just the fact of the matter. Yes, it's about the truth, ultimately. The truth matters. But your goal is to get people to believe the truth. Hopefully, that's your goal. If that's not your goal, then it's manipulation and you're doing something you should stop. But if your goal is to get people to believe the truth, then yes, you are absolutely correct to say, think and believe that the truth matters.

53:52 But that's not the end of it, because you have to have a way, you have to know how to get people to that truth. And you can't get them to the truth if all you do is just keep insisting, This is the truth and you must believe it. You have to know how to get to the truth, and that's where what we're discussing in this episode comes in. That's where persuasion matters. How do you get from where you are to where you need to be? How do you get other people to join you to in going to where they need to be. Where is the truth? How do we get there? Another big part of persuasion is having that degree of confidence, not necessarily in yourself, but in your beliefs. You know, when the uh we did the episode on the fear

54:43 of the Lord, I talked about when I had a stroke and my confidence in God and the fact that that's not me, that's not my faith doing something because I chose it for it to do that. That was God giving me a gift and taking care of me when I needed it. And I only mention it then, I only mention it now because it's an example of how when we have genuine confidence in the promises of the one true God, it's something from outside us that doesn't it gives us a sort of supreme confidence that in the in the liturgy it's described as the the peace of God which passes all understanding. That sort of absolute assurance in a belief, and I'm not saying that you know everything that you believe about all these material things

55:30 should have the same degree of confidence as your confidence in your faith. Our faith should be paramount. And so there are a lot of aspects of this episode that go to sharing the gospel, but they also equally apply to sharing other things. Regardless of what we're sharing, when we're confident and what we're saying, that comes across. And there's a mixture of there there's a balancing act between the confidence and what we have to say and the desire for others to believe it. You know, Corey's father's friend, after thirty years, regardless of the arguments that his dad made to him, the fact that he still cared enough and loved him enough and didn't give an inch of ground on the subject all by itself was a testimony to his faith,

56:18 to the fact that there was something real there. Because that sort of persistence is rarely found where falsehood is found. People don't die with the lie, not in real life. Yeah, if you're trying to trick someone, you might try to go down with a ship for something to gain some advantage, but only if you actually believe something will you stick to it when you have nothing else left to cling to. And so as we look to be persuasive, it's not about winning arguments. I think that's one of the key things. It's not about winning arguments on the internet or in person or anything else. It's not about winning. It's about if you have the truth, any truth, and someone else is missing it, the problem you're trying to solve is to convey

57:04 that truth to them in a way that they'll actually receive it. And again, that may take patience, it may take a particularly rational argument. It depends on whom you're speaking with. Different men will respond differently to different types of arguments. And so in some cases, for some individuals, maybe you're not up to it. And that's fine. You know, a lot of people are not equipped to make the fully sound convincing argument for something to any random man. You know, if there's a if there's a blue-collar guy who's a machinist and on his in his spare time, he does small engine repair. He probably doesn't worry about any of this crap. And God bless him for it. I wish that more people didn't have to worry about these things.

57:51 The reason that a man like that becomes the battle space is that while he is blessed by not paying attention to any of this stuff, many of the subjects that we've discussed in the past episodes are still floating around in the ambient world. And so he's absorbing bits of pieces. And some of those things have been deliberately inserted into the world that he's only barely paying attention to in order to encircle him and limit the options for you know his kids, his community, his schools, whatever, he has fewer options, he has fewer legitimate moral choices in the world's morality because of the things that we talk about. So while he's not paying attention to it, maybe there's a time and a place where you would have a small piece of the

58:38 discussion with such a man and say, hey, you know, did you hear about X, Y, and Z in the news? I think that this is what's going on. I learned this other bit. I think we connect A to B. There's a picture there. The guy who's not going to pay much attention, maybe you can make a case to him, and maybe that's all you do. Maybe all he's worried about is the local schools where his kids go and he wants his kids to turn out as decent human beings, as everyone does. You don't need to make a full case to every single person. You need to make the necessary case to make sure that they can't be used against you. They can't be weaponized to harm what's around them. And for some people, that's the whole hog.

59:19 There are some people that are sufficiently engaged, they're sufficiently persuasive to others that if they're missing out on something, it's important for someone to reach them. Yeah, when I when I was on Myth of the Twentiet Century, one of the questions that Hans asked me was if I could recommend any books on Christian nationalism. And I mentioned uh Torba and Boniface Options book and Stephen Wolfe's book, and I'd said I hadn't read them. And I I think maybe I was a bit uncharitable to those books. Because I hadn't read them, the only impressions I had of them were of the things that those men have said since they came out over the last year or so. And my impression was that the arguments that they were making were

1:00:01 essentially civic nationalist arguments. Arguments that blood doesn't matter, the nations are countries, and therefore it's a legal entity. That was the impression I had. If that was wrong, I apologize. Certainly lately, some of their comments are much closer to things that we're saying. I'm thankful for that. Again, that's I highlight that to say that I think that when those books came out they were making another part of the argument for Christian nationalism, just as I did in the original essay. There was a lot more to say than what I said. It's perfectly legitimate to make part of the argument, if it's the part that you can gain credibility with and you can make credibly. The reason that I highlighted the distinction between my overtly racial view

1:00:50 of Christian nationalism on myth of the twentieth century with Adam was that I know that much of his audience is not Christian or not particularly engaged. And so that what they see coming from within the church is a completely pan-nationalist, essentially universalism, that all human beings are completely interchangeable, borders are evil, countries should be subsumed by basically NGOs, just unifying us as one human mass of charity cases. Like it's just all the horrors that you know Soros is producing, especially in Europe, because guys can walk or take a boat from Africa into Europe. It's harder to get them here. They have to you have to walk up from Mexico. I wanted to specifically highlight to his audience that there's an explicitly

1:01:41 racial case that is a fundamental case in my view of the Christian nationalist argument because I don't want people to think the only way to be Christian is to say that all states must collapse, that all borders must be destroyed, that all people must be wiped out by virtue of interbreeding, that you take every race, you mix it with every other race, until we're all the same color, we have no differentiating features whatsoever. There are a lot of people in the church saying precisely that. And so if I was uncharitable or if I was inaccurate, I apologize to them. I was trying to specifically make the case that there's absolutely a racial view in scripture of nations. It's synonymous. It's synonymous in the law in the seventeen nineties in this country.

1:02:29 It's synonymous two thousand years earlier in scripture. The reason that there's not much discussion of race in Christian history is it was so obvious. There's no theology for us to go back to and borrow from the past when men were more intelligent about making these arguments, because this wasn't the fight. The fight in previous centuries was about other doctrines. And so today, when Satan moves the fight to being about race, about genes, about borders, about the created body, male and female, two sexes, not infinite sexes, disparate races, distinct races, not some just sea of humanity that's indistinguishable. Those are the two sides that they're the most important for me to defend. And so

1:03:17 back to my point earlier about Andrew, if I had attacked him at the time and said, No, we must make the racialist case or there's no case at all, I don't think that he would necessarily be where he is today. Again, I'm not taking credit for that, I'm just saying I could have very easily done harm to my views by being a jerk about it. If I had argued and picked a fight. In fact, I left Gab, you know, about a year later, or maybe not too long after. For unrelated reasons, I was very frustrated with some business choices. He had made some moderation choices, some culture choices on Gab. I made a strategic decision about persuasion not to fling mud at him. Because although I disagreed with the things that he was doing

1:04:01 on his platform, not mine, he's the boss, he owns it, he can do what he wants with it. I strongly disagreed with some of the things that he did and I kept my mouth shut. The reason I did that, the reason I didn't go after him when I was pissed off and I was disappointed, was that despite my differences with him about how he was running his business and some of those strategic strategic decisions, he was still doing very good work and things that mattered to me. And I knew that alienating him, him being a jerk, being the guy who's sniping at someone would make anything that I'm saying elsewhere a turnoff to him. And I highly him in particular because he has influence. He has much more influence than we have.

1:04:42 And we're not ankle biters and we're not trying to ride coattails. But if there are people, there's certain people in the world who have bully pulpits. There are people who have influence over more people than you do. If you're in a position where you can influence someone who's more influential than you, it's really important to get it right. And part of that is not making them regret listening to you. And so I didn't go after him, despite the fact that I was frustrated at the time. I pretty much kept my mouth shut publicly, other than saying a couple things that were limited to the scope of that because he's doing really good work. I saw the trajectory and I hope that he would continue to,

1:05:21 for lack of a better term, move to the right. And he has. He's saying a lot of the things today on Twitter and on Gab that were on the verge of getting people banned from Gab a few years ago. So people change, people's views change. And sometimes being persuasive, they just biting your tongue. One of the most persuasive things that I did in that particular situation was not to be antagonistic about something that wasn't a big ticket item. It had to do with this platform, but it didn't have to do with the larger project that I saw us as allies in, and that is I want this to be a Christian nation. I want his kids to grow up in a place where they're not going to be persecuted for the fact that they're white.

1:06:05 That's important to me. I don't have kids of my own. I never will. The only thing that I can do is effectively to fight for other people's kids in their world. I don't get anything out of any of this. And one of the things that Ab mentioned to me after doing the podcast was that he sees the treatment that Corey and I have received at the hands of the church as part of our persuasion to him. He can tell that we are sincere because we're being treated like crap by some of the people he sees as being detrimental to the world. I I apologize if I'm speaking out of term by saying something you said to me private, but like that is a common view that I think a lot of people have. And Cory and I understand that instinctively, and we also understand it

1:06:46 explicitly from all the conversations we've had with these men. There are a lot of men on the right who don't have a church, they don't know God, they see ontological evil in the world, and they're looking for where people talk about ontological good. That should be the church. It is the church. And yet, Corey and I are two of the only men in the world who can speak to men like Adam and say, look, there's a Christian case to be made for not destroying your race in your nation, in your country. There's a Christian case for that. There's a moral case, you know, there's a secular case too. I want there to be a Christian voice in those conversations. If you're persuasive in a way that makes you someone people

1:07:28 are willing to listen to, you're given the opportunities to say more than maybe you would have just said on your own. You know, if if we were the bomb throwers that people say we are, he wouldn't want to talk to me. I'd just be another crazy guy on the internet. If you can seem calm and persuasive and relaxed and not worry about what people think. People care more about what you think. it's one of the many ironies of the way the human psychology works. We're convinced by people who don't care if they're convincing more than we're convinced by people who really want to be convincing. And it's not an act on the part of Corey and myself. I just I I want you to believe because it's true. And we I frequently say if we never get any credit, fine,

1:08:12 whatever. We never wanted to do this in the first place. We didn't want to start a podcast. We did it because we felt that no one else was speaking to these matters. And the subject of credibility, if you go back and look at the arc of of episodes on Stone Choir, we waited until we were six, eight months in, until we got into some of the really controversial so-called subjects. That was conscious, that was deliberate on our part. If we had begun on episode one talking about Africans and Jews and these other things that get people so angry. We would have just been the podcast that talks about really angering controversial subjects. That's not us. There's a lot of things to talk about. So it's fine to tailor the message, narrow it down, and make

1:08:56 your point and then wait. Let the point do its work. And then you come back later and see if anything's growing and find out if it was rocky soil or if it was fertile soil. But you never know. It's n it's the truth that gives the growth to the message. It's not it's ultimately not how persuasive you are. Really a lot of persuasion is just not getting in the w in the way by your own stumbling In getting in the way of the truth that you're trying to convey to others. When it comes to making these arguments, particularly about complex or central, very important subjects, you should always bear in mind that you may not be the person who actually makes the final part of the argument. You may even not make the majority of the argument.

1:09:46 You may just put one brick in place. You may add one building block. You may be the one who lays part of the foundation. You're building part of the argument for that person. Don't necessarily feel that you have to be the one to make the entirety of the argument. Now if it's a family member or a close friend, maybe you will be the person who makes the rest of the argument as well, but you may be discussing something with someone you met at a coffee shop and you may lay the foundation for someone else to come in and make the rest of that argument in the future. So don't think that necessarily just because you didn't get to whatever ultimate conclusion you think you should have been able to make that

1:10:30 what you did was ineffective or useless. It probably was not. Human beings work by building up information over the course of a lifetime, so all of those interactions matter. It may be that your role is just to add that one brick. Don't necessarily feel that that's unimportant. Go ahead and find a wall, if you're so inclined, and start pulling random bricks out and see what happens. They all matter. Every little piece matters. I'm not actually telling you to go pick apart your neighbor's wall. Don't do that. Only your own wall. But there's another point in all of this that I feel it's important to make explicit. We've sort of implied it throughout the episode so far, but fundamentally, you will never persuade anyone of anything.

1:11:25 Now what I mean by that is something very specific Specific No one is persuaded by someone else because ultimately how it works is the other person takes in the information, takes in the argument, the Data, whatever it is that you are providing, synthesizes that himself and he persuades himself. Now, for some men, it may be that your argument is the one that he takes, makes his own, and persuades himself, given your argument your argument. Now it's it's a subtle point, it seems like a minor point. It's almost on the level of Kant's point about the thing in itself versus the thing as we perceive it with the senses, but it's a salient point. What you are doing is providing that other person with the necessary

1:12:16 means to construct what he needs to arrive at the conclusion. And that's why it's important to know your audience. That's why it's important to know the person with whom you're speaking, because you'll know what he needs to construct that argument for himself, the one that will convince him, that will persuade him. Because ultimately that is an internal matter to the person. Persuasion happens in the psyche, as it were, in the mind of the person being persuaded. It doesn't happen externally. Yes, the information is provided externally, the argumentation in some cases, the data, whatever it may be. But the ultimate persuasion is an internal matter And that is again why knowing your audience, having that relationship, having

1:13:04 that built-up trust truly matters. Because then the person can take what you are giving him and construct the case himself. Because ultimately he is the one doing that final construction in his own mind. So yes, you can be persuasive, but the ultimate act of persuasion lies in the mind of the person persuading, in this case, persuading himself. The last big point that I want to make is is a corollary to that. Something happened in the last few years really in the universe. I think we've all felt it. Between COVID and the BLM riots, I think everyone has a sense that there's been a shift somehow metaphysically. And one of the things that happened both in COVID and with BLM is that the divisions within families, within communities,

1:14:02 within friendships became much more apparent. Or in some cases where there was previously no division, now there is division. The important thing that I want to highlight in the case of of COVID and BLM and all the associated screaming is that when those divisions occurred in what had formerly seemed to be cohesive units, you know, some cases congregations were split by COVID policies or COVID fears or, you know, COVID messaging, whatever. We on the right, the people who are right about these things, should never be the ones who are causing the division for the sake of accusation. What I mean by that is if you look back at BLM and COVID, it was the people on the left who by and large became utterly hysterical and filled with condemnation and rage at anyone

1:15:00 who wouldn't comply. It seemed like there was an entirely new emergent religion that appeared almost fully formed in the span of like six months. And in that time, the adherence to that new religion were vicious to anyone who would not bend the knee to it. You know, literally bending the knee in the case of the BLM crap. Those were the people who were cutting us out of their lives. Those are the people who if we had to cut them out of our lives, it is it was usually self-defense. It was usually actual fear that these people who had once been friends or maybe even family had now become a real potential physical threat to you or your family. And so if you did cut them off, it was almost certainly

1:15:47 defensive. And it wasn't simply, I hate this guy 'cause he's wrong about something. And so the last point that I want to make is that we on the right are not the ones who isolate people and disparage them for being wrong. If you have someone that you love someone you're friends with, some of your neighbors with, and they're wrong about something, that's a matter of Christian love and concern. You want them to be right. You want to help move them in the right direction. But because it is rooted in love and not rooted in wanting to win an argument, you never get to the point that you say I hate you because you don't agree with me. I want nothing to do with you because you believe the wrong thing about this.

1:16:30 That's not us. That's not what we on the right do. That's not how truth behaves. Yeah, Cory and I can tell you don't believe a word we say, go read for yourself, and we know you're going to come to the same conclusions, in part because we don't want you to be persuaded by podcasters or by people writing articles or people writing books. You shouldn't be persuaded by the guy who makes the loudest, angriest, whatever argument. You should be persuaded by truth. And so when we do these meta episodes, we want to get people engaging in metacognition about thinking about thinking about truth. We want you thinking about how you think, how do you incorporate the ideas that you hear into what you believe?

1:17:12 Because it's a two-step process. You hear something, you think about it, if you believe it, it becomes much more intrinsic. What we saw with COVID and BLM is that they kind of skipped the truth part and just went straight to the belief part. And so a religion emerged with nothing behind it except for these fictional fantasy stories and the religious fervor that was used to target us was it was horribly divisive. Again it divided families, it divided communities and congregations in terrible ways. And we should never be the ones who are causing that. So if you're friends with someone and you're further to the right than them, never go after them, certainly publicly, for not being as right as you are, for being wrong about something that you're right

1:18:04 about. Don't tone police the way they say things. You know it's funny, I people think that I'm a bomb thrower on on Twitter, not to the same degree as Corey, but fee people think that we're both antagonistic. If you actually look at me replying to other people's accounts, I very, very rarely say anything negative in someone else's replies. Usually if I reply to someone and I disagree, it's A, it's a mutual. B I'm very respectful, and C I'm trying to make a narrow point. I'm trying to nudge things a little bit. But I But I never look at someone's timelines. I never look at their statements and say, I gotta fix what they're saying. They got something wrong. But it's their timeline. It's their space space to make their point about whatever they want

1:18:50 to talk about. You know. Sometimes I can contribute something helpful. Sometimes I can contribute, you know, I want to nudge in a slightly different direction because I think it'll be helpful to them in what they're actually trying to say. The important point that I want people to take home is that if you see someone making a mistake wherever and in conversation on social media, your first instinct shouldn't be I gotta fix this. You've said that all along. Your friends, your family, especially are not people you should be fixing. They're people you should be loving. And loving them involves helping them at some point get some of these things right. But if there's someone who's friends with you or friends with your

1:19:31 sphere of friends, particularly if you're the undesirables, as Corey and I are, you know, social media is very interesting because anyone can interact with anyone. You know, you can reply to Elon Musk and he may see it. That's incredible. Like that's just that's completely insane. On Gab, you know, it's a smaller space, you can respond to And or he's likely to see it because it's a much more tight knit community, which is one of the awesome things about it. It's a community. It's a it's a town square. It's not like a global billboard. That's a different culture. And that's a good thing. The internet needs multiple different cultures On the internet, if someone says something and you disagree with it,

1:20:12 it's okay to let it go. You don't constantly have to fix everything around you. And so because other people can interact completely a random on Twitter, especially because it's so large, it's very conspicuous to me, especially in the last few months, just kind of looking at my own interactions, who is willing to still talk to me? Because Because there's been such a concerted slander campaign against Corey and myself and against Stone Choir that a lot of people just refuse to acknowledge we exist anymore. Even some who will speak in private won't speak to us in public because there are downsides to them. And I respect that. I don't go after these people in public. I'm not naming them here. I'm not trying to shame anyone by mentioning this.

1:20:55 I'm simply highlighting that there are people who are still willing to follow me, who are willing to respond reply to me and engage with me in public. I respect the fact that they're taking a chance to even be seen interacting favorably. You know, th there are multiple parables in scripture about engaging, you know, with the publican, or you know, you have lepers, you have these text collectors, you have undesirables of the lowest order, and the manner in which they were treated in those days. Today, being on the dissident right is basically being part of a leper colony. And it's artificial. I mean, it's not leprosy. You know, leprosy was a highly contagious hideous disease, it was incurable.

1:21:40 Leprechaunies existed because those people had to be set apart, not only because ceremonially they were unclean, but because they had a horrific contagious disease. There's no contagion among the dissident right. There's only people who are telling the truth, and then other people are afraid to go near them because of it. So I highlight this because if there's someone who's willing to actually still talk to me publicly, I respect that and I respect them for it. And part of my respect for that is that I'm going to engage with them as little as possible because I don't want to bring heat on them by speaking to them. Because there are people who hate me so much that they're sitting in the telegram public chat for Stone Choir trying to dox pastors

1:22:22 and laymen. If the anyone they can find, they want to dox them and go to their congregations and try to get them destroyed. Because Because they hate the fact that we are speaking so much. Why do they hate it? They hate it because we are the men who are actually able to talk to men like Adam and men like Andrew from different perspectives and help them move in a direction that's closer to the truth. And it's a truth that's completely at odds with the world. And there's servants of the world that passionately hate that and will spare no expense of and they'll take any amount of time to try to harm us and anyone who comes near us. So if someone is not willing to come near me publicly, I notice, I absolutely notice.

1:23:03 I'm really good at pattern recognition. If you used to talk to me and you don't anymore, I can tell. And I don't care. I if there's anything to forgive, I certainly forgive it. But it is conspicuous when someone's willing to talk to me. I mention this because if there's someone who's still willing to engage with the men who are treated as lepers and as tax collectors, don't make them regret it. Don't make their lives harder because they're one of the few people who are willing to actually treat us like Christian brothers and like human beings. If If you hold views that are not popular, if you hold views that are contrary to the world's religion, and someone is willing to engage with you, make sure they don't regret it.

1:23:45 I mean that's the one of the chief m messages of this episode. Make sure that when you're trying to persuade someone, sometimes it's just as simple as I'm not going to be a jerk. I'm not going to make your life any harder than it already is. Because you have your own thing to focus on. That's important too, to not be the guy that someone regrets that they were friends with. Because that's a way to lose friends and negatively influence people. So I mentioned the the Andrew example earlier on. If I had gone after him and been a complete jerk, he would have very rightfully ignored some of the things I said and maybe he wouldn't think what he does now. Even maybe if only for the sake that he didn't want to

1:24:24 be associated with someone who would be as much of a jerk as me. So sometimes you just have to shut your mouth and let someone be wrong on the internet. It's not the end of the world. And it may be that by being silent, in the future, you're buying a chance to make the persuasive case that you didn't have the opportunity to make in that moment. Patience, grace are the key elements of persuasion. Sometimes just saying nothing is the most powerful thing you can say. And some part of that is just still being a friend, like Corey's father, who was friends for a man because they were friends, and the fact that the man wouldn't receive the gospel didn't dissuade him from being his friend or from continuing to talk about it.

1:25:04 Being friends with people who have different views is a testimony to the confidence that you have in your own beliefs. So don't let your beliefs become an excuse for you to be brittle. Truth never causes brittleness, it causes strength. And wherever you find strength, especially today, when there are men with convictions, people who don't know anything will see strength being upheld in the face of adversity and think maybe there's some truth behind that. Because there has to be some metaphysical explanation for how someone could withstand the hatred of the world. It can't just maybe he's just completely crazy, or maybe he's on to something. Maybe all you do as a personal witness to the world is

1:25:45 acting in his example who says, I'm still here. You can't chase me away. If that's the only persuasion you can do, that's a powerful message. Because there's so few men today who are willing to do that. So there's a lot to think about here. It's a meta discussion around how we interact with each other and how we think about ourselves. Be patient. It's okay to be quiet. You know, measure twice, cut once. Think before you go after someone, anywhere. Even think before you tell them the things that we talk about on Stone Choir or wherever else you're getting your interesting information. Don't be hasty to try to upend someone else's life. Because even if it's beneficial, it may well upend things.

1:26:30 Have some empathy for that and have some grace for that person to try to go easy and to make it easy for 'em. And if they want nothing to do with it, you should still love them. Because whatever relationship you had beforehand should still exist. And if they respond the way people did with COVID and BLM by writing you off. Well, that was part of Jesus' prophecies of end times that fathers would be adversaries against daughters, mothers and sons, daughter-in-laws and father-in-laws, and butchering the Relationships, like Jesus basically covered everything. Families will be torn down, churches will be torn down internally, not just externally. Whether or not this is an end-time moment, the fact that these

1:27:12 things are happening are always a reminder to us to believe God's promises, because they will come true one day. And when we see them happening, it's not a cause for panic or worry. It's just a cause for making sure that we focus on the things that matter most. And chief of all, that's God and His promises. And that includes the truth of all things in creation.