Transcript: Episode 0039

“Persuasiveness Matters”

This transcript:
  1. Was machine generated.
  2. Has not been checked for errors.
  3. May not be entirely accurate.
WEBVTT

00:00:00 – 00:00:02:	Oh

00:00:30 – 00:00:45:	Welcome to the Stone Choir podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler, and I'm still woe. On today's Stone

00:00:45 – 00:00:50:	Choir, we're going to be discussing persuasion. And the last number of months we've tackled

00:00:50 – 00:00:56:	a bunch of different so-called controversial topics, subjects that the world takes a very

00:00:56 – 00:01:02:	different view than we take, and responds to the views that we have shared on Stone Choir,

00:01:02 – 00:01:08:	generally with hysteria. And we tackle those issues specifically because some of them are

00:01:08 – 00:01:13:	hard to hear, some are probably hard for some of you to hear. And the point is that we wanted

00:01:13 – 00:01:20:	to be able to present a calm reasoned case for these things in part to make the point

00:01:20 – 00:01:25:	about the subjects, but also with every episode that we've done, we're trying to demonstrate

00:01:25 – 00:01:31:	that you don't have to be a bomb-throwing madman to agree with us about Scripture being

00:01:31 – 00:01:37:	true, or about history being true, or about science being true. Truth is truth. And when

00:01:37 – 00:01:42:	faithful, honest men talk about the truth, they should be able to do that without getting

00:01:42 – 00:01:48:	worked up about it. So this week, we're talking about persuasion, specifically, because last

00:01:48 – 00:01:54:	week we talked about not wanting people to get sucked down into the tar pit of, oh, Cam

00:01:54 – 00:02:00:	Red Pill, now I want to know all the Red Pill subjects, and I want to engage in every so-called

00:02:00 – 00:02:04:	conspiracy theory. And I know that they lie to me about something, so they must have lied about

00:02:04 – 00:02:11:	everything. This is now my personality. When we tackle these subjects, we don't want people to

00:02:11 – 00:02:17:	feel like talking about race, or the Jews, or Hitler, is your personality, because it's not,

00:02:17 – 00:02:22:	you know, it's the Ryan Gosling meme where the guy watches Drive. And then for the next eight

00:02:22 – 00:02:27:	years, all of his relationships are defined by pretending to be somebody else. That it's

00:02:27 – 00:02:33:	fake. That's not, it's not mature. It's not healthy. And we certainly don't want to be a part of

00:02:33 – 00:02:38:	anyone else going down that path on any of these subjects, because we all have our lives. We're

00:02:38 – 00:02:44:	living in the community. We're doing whatever it is that God put us here to do. And when you

00:02:44 – 00:02:49:	learn about something new, that's great. Today, we're going to talk about persuasion, because on

00:02:49 – 00:02:55:	one hand, we don't want you to fall into a trap of getting obsessed with stuff, which is something

00:02:55 – 00:02:59:	that Corey and I are often accused, like, Oh, those guys are, those are the race guys, those are

00:02:59 – 00:03:05:	the haters. We're not. And when someone listens, they realize that. But if you only listen to the

00:03:05 – 00:03:11:	slander about us, instead of listening to us, you'll believe that, you know, it's only crazy

00:03:11 – 00:03:17:	people who think these things. When you're clear reasoned arguments, like, Okay, well, that makes

00:03:17 – 00:03:24:	sense, even if you disagree. And so today, we want to talk about how to be persuasive. As you're

00:03:24 – 00:03:30:	tackling some of these subjects, you know, Dale Carnegie with winning friends and influencing

00:03:30 – 00:03:36:	people and the Dilbert guy, Scott Adams, he's talked a lot about persuasion, we're not trying to

00:03:36 – 00:03:44:	jump into that sort of big brain TED talk world, where here's how you make people like you more.

00:03:44 – 00:03:50:	The specific point that we hope to get across in today's episode is that, if and when you choose

00:03:50 – 00:03:55:	to engage in some of the subjects that we discuss, there are certain things you can do if you're

00:03:55 – 00:04:02:	not thinking that will turn people off completely to what it is you're trying to convince them of.

00:04:02 – 00:04:08:	And there are certain things you can do that will be persuasive. It's, this is just basic adult

00:04:08 – 00:04:13:	human stuff. There's a good way and there's a bad way to do anything. And there's no particular

00:04:13 – 00:04:19:	script for how to do it well in every single situation. Every individual is different. You're

00:04:19 – 00:04:23:	different than we are. Your family is different than you are. You have more similarities with your

00:04:23 – 00:04:27:	family than probably with us. You have more similarities with us, you know, we have with

00:04:27 – 00:04:33:	someone on the other side of the world. So they're varying degrees of familiarity. And all those

00:04:33 – 00:04:40:	have to be incorporated into how we discuss things. One of the things that made us think about doing

00:04:40 – 00:04:44:	this episode is that when we did last week's, we were talking about conspiracy theories. Somebody

00:04:44 – 00:04:48:	on Twitter replied and said, you know, basically, he was a fan of the show, and he always looked

00:04:48 – 00:04:52:	forward to what we put out. But he said last week's show wasn't our best work. And I appreciated

00:04:52 – 00:04:58:	that comment because it was, it was critical. He wasn't being nasty, but it made me think. It made

00:04:58 – 00:05:04:	me think specifically, why do we select some of the topics that we select? Why would it be that

00:05:04 – 00:05:08:	someone would hear last week's episode and think, yeah, that wasn't really for me. That wasn't

00:05:08 – 00:05:12:	that great. Maybe he's right. Maybe it was a crap episode and it wasn't suitable for anyone.

00:05:13 – 00:05:17:	Almost immediately after we got a ton of feedback from other people saying, thank you so much for

00:05:17 – 00:05:23:	this episode. I loved it. It was really important. And I realized that one of the reasons for that

00:05:23 – 00:05:27:	disparity, it wasn't that like the guy who said that has bad taste or something, he had never

00:05:27 – 00:05:32:	dealt with probably, I didn't ask about, assume he never dealt with the problems that we were

00:05:32 – 00:05:37:	addressing in that episode. There are a lot of people, especially in the dissident right, who

00:05:37 – 00:05:43:	go completely nuts for so-called conspiracy theories. Like I said, it becomes their personality.

00:05:43 – 00:05:47:	And if you talk to one of those guys, you can't help but hearing about that stuff, even if you

00:05:47 – 00:05:53:	want to talk about something completely different. And so I realized that one of the things that

00:05:53 – 00:06:00:	Corey and I do when we tackle subjects is every episode is not for every listener. That's not to

00:06:00 – 00:06:04:	be dismissive. It's just that we're trying to tackle a specific issue in hopes that, you know,

00:06:04 – 00:06:08:	eventually in a perfect world, everyone would get on the same page. So if you hear something,

00:06:08 – 00:06:14:	you're like, that's not really for me. It's fine if you don't like the episode. But I realized

00:06:14 – 00:06:18:	when he said that, that especially in light of all the other people saying, yeah, those are really

00:06:18 – 00:06:25:	value of episode, I realized that there are people that just don't have certain problems. And so

00:06:25 – 00:06:32:	when if we do an episode, and you're like, that doesn't have anything to do with me, I'm not saying

00:06:32 – 00:06:39:	you should just like every episode. If someone says something, and it doesn't make sense to you,

00:06:39 – 00:06:44:	and we're telling you, this is a big problem in the world, like conspiracy theory obsession is a

00:06:44 – 00:06:49:	problem in the world, especially on the right. So when we say, Hey, here's a really important

00:06:49 – 00:06:53:	thing to deal with. And someone's like, that doesn't have anything to do with me. Hey, thank God,

00:06:53 – 00:06:58:	that you've been spared that. But be be aware that there are people who are actually being

00:06:58 – 00:07:05:	significantly burdened by confusion and disorientation and obsession in some cases,

00:07:05 – 00:07:09:	about a subject that thankfully you've been spared. And that's kind of the case with a lot of

00:07:09 – 00:07:13:	reps. As you know, some people, you know, there are some people in certain denominations, when we

00:07:13 – 00:07:17:	talked about slavery, like, yeah, that's fine. You know, maybe it's not exactly what I've heard

00:07:17 – 00:07:23:	in church, but that's consistent with a scriptural approach. And then there are other people who

00:07:23 – 00:07:28:	completely freak out because I've never heard anything except for the modern, strictly moral

00:07:28 – 00:07:36:	anti slavery views that have only existed in the last century and a half. So one of the things

00:07:36 – 00:07:43:	about being persuasive is really knowing your audience. In our case, as podcasters, we have a

00:07:43 – 00:07:48:	generic audience is entirely opt in. But we don't know you, we don't know you personally, we don't

00:07:48 – 00:07:53:	know what your interests are, your concerns are. So obviously, we can't address every episode to

00:07:53 – 00:07:59:	each person listening individually. So when you think that there's a miss on something, just think

00:07:59 – 00:08:03:	about maybe the fact that there are other people out there that are dealing with something that

00:08:03 – 00:08:09:	you've been spared, you know, be thankful for that, but also be aware of it. Because if we take the

00:08:09 – 00:08:13:	time to devote an entire week to something, it's because we see enough in the world, we haven't,

00:08:13 – 00:08:18:	you know, enough people commenting to us DMing us, we've seen enough struggle that we're saying,

00:08:18 – 00:08:25:	this is something affecting others. And when we talk about being persuasive, that's part of it,

00:08:25 – 00:08:31:	knowing that my problems are not necessarily your problems. You know, the worst thing that's ever

00:08:31 – 00:08:36:	happened to me is going to be different in degree than the worst thing that's ever happened to each

00:08:36 – 00:08:41:	person listening. You know, there's some people who maybe you have a horse girl where she has,

00:08:41 – 00:08:44:	she's rich, daddy's rich. And the worst thing that's ever happened to her in her life, she's

00:08:44 – 00:08:50:	never lost friends or family, but her dad had to sell her horse. And she was bereft. That was the

00:08:50 – 00:08:56:	worst thing that ever happened to her. I think we have a tendency to look at someone, you know,

00:08:56 – 00:09:01:	like that in the hypothetical, and be completely unsympathetic and say, Oh, you spoiled little

00:09:01 – 00:09:09:	brat. How dare you complain about this when my problems are XYZ worse than that. The sympathetic

00:09:09 – 00:09:14:	approach is to look at that and to empathize to realize that that was the worst day in that girl's

00:09:14 – 00:09:20:	life. If the horse that she dearly loved got sold, you know, for whatever reason, and that was

00:09:20 – 00:09:24:	cause of heartbreak, she's heartbroken. It's the worst thing that ever happened to her.

00:09:25 – 00:09:31:	I think that we can approach things as we're trying to be persuasive and just trying to discuss

00:09:31 – 00:09:37:	things with people to some degree by putting ourselves in their shoes. Because if something

00:09:37 – 00:09:42:	is really hurting someone else and it doesn't bother you at all, you have to keep that in mind

00:09:43 – 00:09:47:	when you're interacting with them and certainly don't dismiss whatever is concerning them. Because

00:09:47 – 00:09:53:	even if their concerns are dumb or wrong, it's still what's concerning them. And you can find

00:09:53 – 00:09:57:	common ground simply in the fact that you yourself have concerns or things that burden you, things

00:09:57 – 00:10:02:	that frighten you, things that confuse you. And so if the only commonality that you have with the

00:10:02 – 00:10:08:	person you're talking to is that you share having had a bad day, that's still a place to begin.

00:10:08 – 00:10:13:	And so I think as we begin talking about persuasion, finding common ground is one of the most

00:10:13 – 00:10:20:	crucial elements. So I think at the outset, it's important to distinguish between two distinct

00:10:20 – 00:10:28:	things that are both really in this area we're discussing in this episode. The first is persuasion,

00:10:28 – 00:10:33:	which is what we are discussing properly. How do you persuade someone of something? What is

00:10:33 – 00:10:39:	persuasion? And the second is manipulation. There's a distinction between these. We are not talking

00:10:39 – 00:10:46:	about manipulation. Some of the psychology or things like that would get into manipulation,

00:10:46 – 00:10:50:	where you're talking about propaganda in the negative sense, and we'll get into that later

00:10:50 – 00:10:57:	in the episode as well. But for our purposes here, persuasion is attempting to convince someone of

00:10:57 – 00:11:05:	something by engaging with that person. So you're engaging that person's reason or emotions. It's

00:11:05 – 00:11:11:	not always wrong to engage the emotions. God gave you emotions for a reason. You don't totally ignore

00:11:11 – 00:11:16:	them. Yes, when you're dealing with something that is a purely logical problem, you set your

00:11:16 – 00:11:22:	emotions aside. It's important to be able to do that, particularly for men. But it's not wrong

00:11:22 – 00:11:27:	to engage the emotions of another person per se. That can be used to manipulate, of course.

00:11:28 – 00:11:35:	But the distinction is that manipulation is an attempt to circumvent or subvert, to take advantage

00:11:35 – 00:11:43:	of the other person in some way. So you're trying to befuddle the person, confuse the person,

00:11:43 – 00:11:50:	engage with emotions that aren't really at issue here in order to manipulate the outcome. So it's

00:11:50 – 00:11:56:	the difference basically in intent. There's some difference in means as well, but largely it's the

00:11:56 – 00:12:05:	intent. Persuasion you want to bring the person to, one would think, your position through convincing

00:12:05 – 00:12:11:	the person, engaging with that person's reason, engaging with that person's emotions, engaging

00:12:11 – 00:12:18:	with that person's thoughts, etc. Whereas with manipulation, again, you are attempting to subvert

00:12:18 – 00:12:28:	or control. Now, manipulation technically is not an inherently negative term. Because manipulation

00:12:28 – 00:12:32:	also has the sense of just doing something skillfully, because it just comes from Latin

00:12:32 – 00:12:37:	manipulus, which is Latin for handful, has to do with the hands. And the hands are obviously

00:12:38 – 00:12:45:	dexterous, as it were. However, in modern English, manipulation has taken off that negative

00:12:45 – 00:12:50:	connotation. So here, we'll just contrast those two. Persuasion being what we are discussing,

00:12:50 – 00:12:56:	manipulation being sort of the shadow version of it, the dark version of it, not what we are

00:12:56 – 00:13:01:	advocating. And as well mentioned, we're not going to get into the psychology of, you know,

00:13:01 – 00:13:07:	if you want to convince someone, do these four things in this order. Yes, we could get into that,

00:13:07 – 00:13:16:	but that's not the point here. The point of the episode is, how do you engage with other people

00:13:16 – 00:13:23:	in a meaningful way on these topics? And how do you choose when to engage? Because that's part of

00:13:23 – 00:13:30:	it. As Will mentioned, you don't just always go 100% on every single one of these issues.

00:13:31 – 00:13:38:	Yes, you've listened to the episodes on race and World War II. That doesn't mean that the first

00:13:38 – 00:13:45:	thing you say when you sit down to have a beer with someone is, so, how about racial IQ? You don't

00:13:45 – 00:13:50:	open that way. I mean, maybe if it's with your friends and it's a joke, fine, but you have to

00:13:50 – 00:13:57:	know your audience. You have to know where you are as well. And how to engage with that audience

00:13:57 – 00:14:05:	in that place. And so, as was mentioned, we don't know our audience personally. Of course,

00:14:05 – 00:14:10:	we know some of you personally, but we generally don't know the overwhelming majority of our audience

00:14:10 – 00:14:16:	personally. So what we are doing here is necessarily more general than what you would be doing with

00:14:16 – 00:14:23:	someone in person or what we would do with someone in person. Woe was just on the myth of the 20th

00:14:23 – 00:14:30:	century. And there, he is engaging personally with someone. So that's different from how you would

00:14:30 – 00:14:35:	engage, say, on this podcast with the audience. With each other, we can engage personally. We

00:14:35 – 00:14:40:	know each other. But with the audience, it has to be more general. So the first thing you want to do

00:14:40 – 00:14:47:	when you're going to persuade someone is just to know the other person. Start with an actual

00:14:47 – 00:14:52:	conversation with the person. You don't have to open up with politics and religion and theology.

00:14:54 – 00:15:01:	You can open with a general discussion. You're building a relationship, building rapport to some

00:15:01 – 00:15:07:	degree, and that is going to count toward whether or not that person will give any weight to what

00:15:07 – 00:15:17:	you say later. If you just open up cold open with so about the world war two, probably not going

00:15:17 – 00:15:24:	to get you anywhere. That's part of why people like the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons,

00:15:24 – 00:15:28:	when they do the cold call at your front door, they typically don't get anywhere with that.

00:15:30 – 00:15:37:	Now, maybe over time, they can wear certain people down. But if you have a relationship with

00:15:37 – 00:15:43:	someone, you have an established rapport, you're going to be more successful in persuading that

00:15:43 – 00:15:49:	person. So that first part is just getting to know your audience, knowing your audience.

00:15:50 – 00:15:54:	And that goes back to something that we've discussed in the past, the basic question,

00:15:54 – 00:16:00:	what problem are you trying to solve? And I think something that I hope that people in our

00:16:00 – 00:16:05:	audience will keep in mind is that if you learn something new, maybe it's from Stone Choir,

00:16:05 – 00:16:09:	maybe it's somewhere else, and it's a really big deal to you, like it revolutionizes some

00:16:09 – 00:16:14:	aspect of how you view the world, you're probably going to be excited about that. Like,

00:16:14 – 00:16:19:	this is cool, like this opens up new horizons. This explains things that I never understood

00:16:19 – 00:16:23:	before. I'm energized, I have this new knowledge, and you want to share it.

00:16:25 – 00:16:30:	The question of what problem are you trying to solve when you're looking to persuade people in

00:16:30 – 00:16:37:	your own life is that I think the mistake that many people make in interpersonal discussions is

00:16:38 – 00:16:43:	suddenly the problem you want to solve with your friends or God forbid your family is,

00:16:43 – 00:16:48:	oh, they're not red-pilled. I need to go lecture them about these things that I know about and

00:16:48 – 00:16:55:	that they're wrong about, and I need to fix them. That is exactly the wrong approach. If you approach

00:16:55 – 00:17:02:	wanting to discuss a subject in terms of I need to fix you, it's revolting. We did an episode,

00:17:02 – 00:17:07:	five-part episode on race, three-part episode on Jews, between those is probably close to 20 hours

00:17:07 – 00:17:15:	of content. As Corey mentioned, people knocking on doors for these cults, if I showed up on your

00:17:15 – 00:17:20:	door and said, hey, I'm here to talk to you about race for three hours, you're going to chase me off.

00:17:20 – 00:17:25:	Even if you happen to like me, you're not going to want to hear it. There's a blessed passivity to

00:17:26 – 00:17:30:	things like podcasts and articles that you can share with other people because it's completely

00:17:30 – 00:17:37:	one-sided. You can pick up an article or maybe a book or a podcast episode and you can listen or

00:17:37 – 00:17:42:	read, engage in your own time on your own terms. If you don't like it, you can just walk away. If

00:17:43 – 00:17:48:	we say something in one of our episodes that rubs you the wrong way, like, I got to put this down,

00:17:48 – 00:17:53:	it's annoying or whatever, you can't. You don't have to chase us off to do it because we don't

00:17:53 – 00:18:00:	know who you are. There's never any mutual engagement there, so we can make a case for

00:18:00 – 00:18:05:	something in this sort of passive teaching environment. There's different fundamentals

00:18:05 – 00:18:10:	than the way you can make a case to someone you know personally. The very thing that we can do

00:18:10 – 00:18:15:	quite successfully on a podcast where take it or leave it, you can listen or not,

00:18:15 – 00:18:20:	it would be virtually impossible to do this in person to strangers, even though virtually all

00:18:20 – 00:18:26:	of you are strangers to us. The fact that we're not coming to you and trying to convince you

00:18:26 – 00:18:33:	is part of what makes it easy for you to listen. I think one of the keys for us to understand as

00:18:33 – 00:18:39:	we're engaging interpersonally is that one of the things that we say all the time, I particularly

00:18:39 – 00:18:42:	say a lot here and I actually said on the midst of the 20th century this past week,

00:18:42 – 00:18:48:	I don't care if anyone agrees with me. Adam on the other show thankfully got me to clarify,

00:18:48 – 00:18:52:	didn't mean that I'm completely indifferent to people believing these things. What I was talking

00:18:52 – 00:18:59:	about and what I'd say on this podcast frequently is I am completely outcome independent to how you

00:18:59 – 00:19:05:	receive this information. Yes, Corey and I are spending probably about 30 hours a week on some

00:19:05 – 00:19:11:	of the easier episodes preparing and delivering this stuff to you. So there's clearly investment,

00:19:11 – 00:19:15:	we wouldn't be doing this if no one were listening and we thought no one cared.

00:19:16 – 00:19:20:	When I say I don't care, what I mean is that if you as an individual who's completely

00:19:20 – 00:19:26:	undone to me don't agree with the thing that we just told you, that's okay. We frequently say

00:19:26 – 00:19:32:	take it or leave it. There are a lot of episodes where we explicitly say don't take our word for it,

00:19:32 – 00:19:37:	don't listen to a couple of podcasters, tell you stuff. It's completely contrary to everything

00:19:37 – 00:19:42:	you've ever heard. That should rightly raise your hackles. I use that phrase frequently. We have a

00:19:42 – 00:19:52:	natural basic animal understanding of something being off and the instinctual response to off is

00:19:52 – 00:19:57:	to be protective and that's fine, that's good. The reason that Corey and I can say it's fine if

00:19:57 – 00:20:02:	you don't believe us, go look for yourself is that we know that we're telling you the truth.

00:20:02 – 00:20:06:	And so our confidence in the subjects that we discuss is based on the fact that we know

00:20:07 – 00:20:13:	we've done all the legwork long before we come to the microphone and deliver one of these episodes.

00:20:13 – 00:20:19:	So when I say I don't care and I say you can take it or leave it, it's not that I don't

00:20:19 – 00:20:25:	want you to believe or I'm indifferent. It's that if you say that's crap, I don't believe any of it.

00:20:25 – 00:20:32:	There's no skin off my nose. It doesn't hurt me if you don't agree. And while that's easy

00:20:32 – 00:20:38:	in an impersonal situation like a podcast, I think the vital thing that one of the key things I hope

00:20:38 – 00:20:44:	people will take away from this episode is that it's okay to have a sense of that same spirit

00:20:44 – 00:20:51:	in person with your friends, with your family. And one of the big turnoffs when you want to

00:20:51 – 00:20:54:	talk about a subject is when it's just the most important thing in the world for you to talk about

00:20:54 – 00:21:01:	it. If you're just brimming with excitement to tell somebody about something, maybe the best

00:21:01 – 00:21:06:	approach, it depends on your relationship, maybe a relationship where your friend is just used to

00:21:06 – 00:21:12:	you getting excited about stuff and they'll humor you. But sometimes for some people, depending

00:21:12 – 00:21:17:	on their personalities and their friends, if you're brimming with excitement to share something you

00:21:17 – 00:21:22:	just learned, maybe the best thing is to wait and to say nothing and to let it naturally come up in

00:21:22 – 00:21:27:	conversation. So you've been informed, you've learned about something, you really want to share

00:21:27 – 00:21:34:	details, but you don't want to be this guy who's just wild eyed about convincing other people.

00:21:34 – 00:21:40:	Sometimes the best way to be convincing is to completely relax and just forget about it.

00:21:40 – 00:21:47:	And then later on, maybe months down the road, some say rice or IQ comes up, you now have

00:21:47 – 00:21:51:	something you can contribute to the conversation that's going to be novel to your circle of friends

00:21:51 – 00:21:56:	because they're not listening, they haven't heard this stuff before. You can drop a few facts in

00:21:56 – 00:22:01:	conversation that are probably going to blow their minds and maybe they'll get really mad at you,

00:22:01 – 00:22:06:	like some people get mad at us, maybe they'll pique their curiosity. The nice thing about

00:22:06 – 00:22:11:	having resources like books and articles and podcasts to point people to is that you don't

00:22:11 – 00:22:16:	have to have the personal investment to say you must believe and listen to this thing right away.

00:22:16 – 00:22:20:	This is the most important thing. You can say, you know what, I heard something really interesting.

00:22:20 – 00:22:25:	Listen to this episode, tell me how you think. I found it curious. I was really interested by

00:22:25 – 00:22:30:	what they have to say. You can be non-committal, but curious, and that doesn't put pressure on

00:22:30 – 00:22:35:	the other person to have to just say, you're absolutely right. Those guys make complete sense.

00:22:35 – 00:22:39:	Maybe they're going to respond very negatively. And so one of the reasons that Corey and I created

00:22:39 – 00:22:46:	Stone Choir is that we can take the heat for you. We can be the crazy men screaming into the void

00:22:46 – 00:22:51:	on the internet. And then if a few people come along in here and say, yeah, that makes sense,

00:22:51 – 00:22:56:	then you can have a conversation with your friend in your own particular context in a way that

00:22:58 – 00:23:03:	we've delivered the scary payload, and then you can work with whatever bits and pieces and add

00:23:03 – 00:23:08:	your own. And say you disagree with something we said and agree with something else, but you can

00:23:08 – 00:23:14:	take the pressure off of yourself and off of your friends and family if you say, hey, here's something

00:23:14 – 00:23:18:	somebody else is doing. We've had a lot of feedback recently. I mentioned it to Adam on

00:23:18 – 00:23:22:	Myth of the 20th Century that a number of people have said wives and girlfriends have started

00:23:22 – 00:23:27:	listening. And I realize that for saying that to individuals who said that, it might seem a little

00:23:27 – 00:23:33:	doxy. Any wives and girlfriends who are listening, I want you to know that we've heard that dozens

00:23:33 – 00:23:37:	of times in the last couple of weeks. So you should assume if you were one of those wives and

00:23:37 – 00:23:43:	girl or girlfriends, hopefully not both that or mothers in some cases, it's not the man in your

00:23:43 – 00:23:46:	life that we're talking about. It's somebody else because there've been a bunch of people. So it's

00:23:46 – 00:23:51:	kind of like a firing squad where there's a blank. Assume that the guy that your boyfriend or husband

00:23:51 – 00:23:56:	who told you to watch, he's not the one who DMed us because we don't people feel like there's a

00:23:56 – 00:24:01:	conspiracy to trick you into believing things. That's precisely the opposite intent of what we

00:24:01 – 00:24:07:	have. Here's some stuff. Take it or leave it. We think there's some value here. That's an approach

00:24:07 – 00:24:12:	that when we take it in personally, it becomes very convincing just because the guys have relaxed.

00:24:12 – 00:24:18:	He's not freaking out. There's inherent skepticism when anyone delivers new information.

00:24:18 – 00:24:23:	And if they deliver it in a way that's wild-eyed and wants to grab you by the lapels and shake

00:24:23 – 00:24:29:	you and say, you must believe this, my first response is no. I want no part of that. So we

00:24:29 – 00:24:33:	want to make sure that we don't come across that way and we don't just naturally. That's not my

00:24:33 – 00:24:39:	personality or Cordy's personality, but the same can also be even more effective in person.

00:24:39 – 00:24:43:	Say, hey, there's this cool thing I learned about. What do you think about it?

00:24:43 – 00:24:49:	And ask that way. Don't say you must believe this. Say, here's an interesting article. Here's an

00:24:49 – 00:24:54:	interesting podcast. What do you think about this? And then use it as a springboard for your own

00:24:54 – 00:25:00:	discussion to think what you think about the thing. It doesn't need to be to mirror what some

00:25:00 – 00:25:05:	stranger on the internet told you. What do you think about the thing? How do you think it affects

00:25:05 – 00:25:10:	your life? That becomes personal. It doesn't become, here's a religious tenant of this new

00:25:10 – 00:25:16:	big red pill discovery I have. It's just, huh, I think this is a fact. And I think it has this

00:25:16 – 00:25:22:	to do with life. And I think that's relevant. What do you think? That can be an interesting

00:25:22 – 00:25:29:	human conversation at a small scale where there's no hard feelings. If they say that's racist,

00:25:29 – 00:25:34:	that's dumb, you can just laugh and say, well, I think everything gets called racist at this point.

00:25:34 – 00:25:38:	So I don't think that matters. Oh, by the way, those guys did an entire episode on the invention

00:25:38 – 00:25:44:	of racism in the 20th century. Maybe find out what the word that you're using actually means.

00:25:44 – 00:25:49:	And then again, you can blame someone else if they disagree. You don't have to fight. We don't

00:25:49 – 00:25:55:	want people fighting with each other or straining relationships for the sake of things that,

00:25:56 – 00:26:00:	even though they do have impact on all of our lives, it's not immediately obvious.

00:26:00 – 00:26:07:	And so the immediacy of the need is really what this part is about. There's no immediate need

00:26:07 – 00:26:11:	for the person you're talking to to agree with you. Just as there's no immediate need for you to

00:26:11 – 00:26:16:	agree with us, you listen to an episode saying, yeah, I don't get that. That's dumb, or it's crazy,

00:26:16 – 00:26:21:	or whatever. That's fine. Maybe you come back to a later, maybe you completely forget about it and

00:26:21 – 00:26:26:	never care. That's perfectly okay. If you take that approach with your friends and family,

00:26:26 – 00:26:33:	you can still have normal human relationships with them, even while you're incorporating new

00:26:33 – 00:26:38:	things that you've learned into your life and maybe your conversations. But don't make it the

00:26:38 – 00:26:43:	determining factor for whether or not you're going to be friends with your friends, or certainly

00:26:43 – 00:26:47:	whether you're going to have a loving relationship with family. None of these things should ever

00:26:47 – 00:26:53:	undermine those things as far as it depends on you. You touched on a couple of things there that

00:26:53 – 00:26:58:	I want to expand. But first, I guess I really should give an example of manipulation,

00:26:59 – 00:27:04:	not being a negative thing, because I did say that and some maybe have not encountered that.

00:27:05 – 00:27:10:	One of the best and most obvious examples is interacting with a small child, particularly

00:27:10 – 00:27:16:	one who is being cantankerous or uncooperative for some reason, maybe he doesn't want to put on his

00:27:16 – 00:27:22:	shoes. A neat little trick, if you've never done this with children, I highly recommend you use

00:27:22 – 00:27:29:	this, is instead of saying, would you like to do something? Or if you do this, then we'll

00:27:30 – 00:27:36:	give him two options, both of which are acceptable to you. So for instance, if your child is not

00:27:36 – 00:27:41:	picking what he wants to eat for lunch, or he's just being difficult with eating his lunch,

00:27:41 – 00:27:47:	say would you rather have carrots or broccoli? Assuming he'll actually eat either of those.

00:27:48 – 00:27:54:	Most children, when given the option of two things, will pick one. Yes, eventually they get old

00:27:54 – 00:28:00:	enough to figure out your trick and go, no, I want candy. But for a while it works. And that's

00:28:00 – 00:28:06:	manipulation. That's not negative. You're actually being a parent or an uncle or whatever you happen

00:28:06 – 00:28:13:	to be with relation to this child. You're doing your duty. And yes, you're manipulating the child

00:28:13 – 00:28:17:	to do it. But that's a positive. You're doing it for a good reason in a good way.

00:28:19 – 00:28:26:	But then the two things on which I wanted to expand. First, you touch tangentially on the fact

00:28:27 – 00:28:35:	that human beings are hardwired to process things negatively, more so than positively.

00:28:37 – 00:28:42:	This is just an important psychological and biological fact about humanity. And the reason

00:28:42 – 00:28:50:	for it is fairly obvious if you think about it. If you are walking through the woods, and you hear

00:28:50 – 00:28:56:	some strange noise, and you decide, yep, that must be a bear or a wolf, I am going to go the other

00:28:56 – 00:29:03:	direction, you're probably going to survive whatever that encounter is. Unless you're being

00:29:03 – 00:29:08:	actively stalked by something in which case, you're still more aware your odds go up. If on the other

00:29:08 – 00:29:13:	hand you are the person who just says, oh, must be a squirrel, and just keeps walking, you put a

00:29:13 – 00:29:20:	positive spin on it, you are more likely to be eaten by something and not survive. And so,

00:29:20 – 00:29:27:	evolutionarily, and I do mean in the micro sense, the minor sense, not speciation, I'm not talking

00:29:27 – 00:29:32:	about that. And as Christians, yes, we can say that evolution in the micro sense is true. We know

00:29:32 – 00:29:37:	that. That's why we have different breeds of dogs. That's why we have different races of men. But

00:29:37 – 00:29:45:	when it comes down to it, we are hardwired for a negative interpretation of novel information,

00:29:46 – 00:29:53:	unless we have reason, good reason, to put a positive spin on it. So this goes back to that

00:29:53 – 00:29:59:	building of a relationship. If you are speaking with someone whom you trust, and that person gives

00:29:59 – 00:30:05:	you novel information, you don't necessarily have to put the negative spin on it that you

00:30:05 – 00:30:12:	otherwise would because you trust the source. For instance, if we go back to the example of

00:30:12 – 00:30:17:	being out in the woods, if you're wandering through the woods and you find a random mushroom and pick

00:30:17 – 00:30:22:	it up, unless you're a crazy person, you're not going to just eat the random mushroom if you don't

00:30:22 – 00:30:28:	know what it is. However, if you're walking through the woods hiking with your friend who knows

00:30:28 – 00:30:33:	mushrooms really well and he hands you a mushroom, you're more likely to maybe try that.

00:30:33 – 00:30:40:	So it matters that relationship you have, and it's important to bear in mind that we are all,

00:30:40 – 00:30:47:	to various degrees, of course, hardwired to put a negative spin on novel information.

00:30:49 – 00:30:53:	At least if we haven't become completely credulous and we believe everything we hear,

00:30:53 – 00:31:01:	which is the opposite problem. But then I really already touched on the second point I wanted to

00:31:02 – 00:31:11:	expand on the issue of trust, and that's vital to all of this. Whether or not the audience trusts

00:31:11 – 00:31:16:	you, whether or not the person with whom you're speaking can trust the things you say, and that's

00:31:16 – 00:31:23:	built over time. Trust takes time to build. It can be destroyed in seconds, which is always important

00:31:23 – 00:31:29:	to bear in mind, but it takes time to build. And that is fundamentally one of the things

00:31:29 – 00:31:36:	that we are doing on this podcast. It's why we don't mislead on anything. Whether or not you want

00:31:36 – 00:31:42:	to hear it, whether or not it is going to be necessarily good for us to say it, whatever the

00:31:42 – 00:31:49:	consequences may be, if it's true, we're going to say it. Now, we may endeavor to say it in a way

00:31:49 – 00:31:55:	that is persuasive, hence why we are doing this episode, and it wouldn't make much sense if we

00:31:55 – 00:32:02:	deliberately produced episodes in a way that was not persuasive, but we are not going to subvert

00:32:02 – 00:32:06:	the facts or the truth in order to be persuasive, that veers into manipulation,

00:32:07 – 00:32:14:	because part of the reason we can be effective, part of the reason you can share these episodes

00:32:14 – 00:32:22:	with others and actually have people listen and perhaps believe the things we say, is because of

00:32:22 – 00:32:28:	that building of trust, the fact that we are going to tell the truth about every single topic

00:32:29 – 00:32:37:	that comes up on this podcast, because building that trust over time is vitally important,

00:32:37 – 00:32:44:	and all it takes is lying on one topic or about one facet of a topic, and it destroys that trust,

00:32:44 – 00:32:49:	because then people, when they listen to you, if they know in the past you've lied about something,

00:32:49 – 00:32:54:	particularly something important, then they're going to wonder if you're lying every time.

00:32:55 – 00:33:01:	Now, that eventually attenuates to some degree over time, so if you lied to someone 10 years

00:33:01 – 00:33:07:	ago about something, and you have been truthful since, that's largely in the past,

00:33:08 – 00:33:16:	but it can take years, so it is important to maintain that trust you have with others

00:33:16 – 00:33:21:	if you are going to attempt to be persuasive with those others.

00:33:22 – 00:33:28:	And on the subject of lying, it's important again to distinguish between if we were to

00:33:28 – 00:33:34:	deceive for the purpose of advancing one of our points, and if we simply got something factually

00:33:34 – 00:33:40:	wrong, we endeavored gray lengths not to let that happen, we're not perfect, we may miss speak, we

00:33:40 – 00:33:46:	may inadvertently misconstrue something, it's not going to be something that's a key part of a point,

00:33:46 – 00:33:50:	but we're not saying if anyone ever makes any mistakes in their entire life, you write them

00:33:50 – 00:33:56:	off, because that's insane, no one can survive that. But again, it's the deception, we talked last

00:33:56 – 00:34:02:	week about some of the people engaging in some of these clear deceptions, where it's clear that

00:34:02 – 00:34:08:	they're, whether they're grifters or they're just being entertaining, they're willing to

00:34:08 – 00:34:14:	fill people's heads full of lies for the sake of entertainment, and who knows what they get out

00:34:14 – 00:34:21:	of that doesn't matter. That's fundamentally different from just miss speaking or accidentally

00:34:21 – 00:34:25:	mistaking something, you know, for example, when I was on Myth of the 20th century is after I

00:34:25 – 00:34:32:	normally go to sleep, and so when I'm extremely tired, my reason, my faculties are fully intact,

00:34:32 – 00:34:37:	but my recall just goes in the toilet. So a couple times I completely flubbed some timeline stuff,

00:34:37 – 00:34:41:	and like, you know, if you, I practically had Moses landing on the moon, I was getting some

00:34:41 – 00:34:47:	of the timelines still wrong. That doesn't discredit what I said, because like, I acknowledge you at

00:34:47 – 00:34:54:	the time. But the overall point I was making wasn't hinging on that. And I think it's okay for you,

00:34:54 – 00:35:00:	like, try to get things straight before you say them as we do. But if you make a mistake, don't

00:35:01 – 00:35:06:	be terrified of that either. That's, that's human to, to miss speak or to accidentally get something

00:35:06 – 00:35:11:	wrong. If you find that you've made an error in something factually, go back and fix it.

00:35:13 – 00:35:16:	On the related note of, you know, outcome independence and

00:35:17 – 00:35:23:	convincing people over time, I think time is a key part of this. You know, when we do an episode,

00:35:23 – 00:35:29:	we lay it down and then move on. And we'll refer it off into previous episodes and newer ones,

00:35:29 – 00:35:34:	as we're doing in this one. For example, one of the early episodes we did on framing,

00:35:34 – 00:35:39:	this is really a continuation of that. In the framing episode, we focused entirely on

00:35:39 – 00:35:44:	the use of frame in persuasion or deception. So this is kind of a continuation of that

00:35:45 – 00:35:50:	metacognition aspect of things. You know, this is, this is a meta episode where we're talking

00:35:50 – 00:35:56:	about thinking about talking about things, which is most people don't normally approach

00:35:56 – 00:36:00:	things that way. We're willing to do that, even though it's, you know, it's kind of a lull episode

00:36:00 – 00:36:05:	in terms of here's not a ton of new facts. It's just we've been delivering so many facts over

00:36:05 – 00:36:10:	the last number of months that are really hard to swallow. In some cases for some people,

00:36:10 – 00:36:15:	we want to just give people a little bit of time to digest and then figure out how to incorporate

00:36:15 – 00:36:20:	it themselves. I want to give a personal example of this, just kind of demonstrate, like we,

00:36:20 – 00:36:25:	we don't want to make this about us, but on this podcast, we are the frame of reference for everything.

00:36:25 – 00:36:30:	So as you're listening, you know, you can apply what we're saying about ourselves

00:36:30 – 00:36:33:	in your own lives. I don't want you thinking about us when you're thinking about yourself

00:36:33 – 00:36:38:	and how you can live a better Christian life, speaking faithfully in your community. So

00:36:38 – 00:36:44:	just pointing to our example is not intended to be self aggrandizing. It's literally just

00:36:44 – 00:36:47:	here's something that happened and maybe you can learn something from it.

00:36:48 – 00:36:55:	I was on Gab for a year or so. I prior to that, I had engaged before I got on Gab for,

00:36:55 – 00:36:58:	for good, after I finally got expelled from Twitter for the last time,

00:36:58 – 00:37:03:	I had engaged with Andrew Torbund Gab and I eventually gave him a whole rash of crap

00:37:03 – 00:37:07:	because of some of his hiring practices. I was pretty antagonistic about him openly and he

00:37:07 – 00:37:13:	blocked me and like, I don't blame him. I was, I was ankle biting on his timeline. And I was right

00:37:13 – 00:37:18:	incidentally about his hiring practices. He turned out later on to regret some of those people, but

00:37:20 – 00:37:24:	we began with kind of a strange relationship and then I got on Gab and he gave me a second chance

00:37:24 – 00:37:28:	and eventually he started boosting some of the things that I said and I appreciated that because

00:37:29 – 00:37:38:	I had shifted focus more than in 2017 versus 2020. And I can't remember the time. I think it was,

00:37:38 – 00:37:46:	it was either the end of 2019 or 2020 was, I think it's probably 2020 when I was invited by Andrew

00:37:46 – 00:37:54:	to do an essay on Christian nationalism. It was one of the earliest things that news.gab had been.

00:37:54 – 00:38:00:	They'd just begun sort of highlighting writers from the community. Boniface Option was one of

00:38:00 – 00:38:05:	the first guys he had and he had a few others, but I was one of the very first. I was almost the first

00:38:05 – 00:38:11:	to be invited to discuss anything about Christian nationalism. Now, the episode that Cory and I

00:38:11 – 00:38:17:	did on Christian nationalism earlier this year was a much more fully fleshed out version of

00:38:17 – 00:38:22:	what I gave to Andrew. And the reason I'm highlighting this example is that when I was

00:38:22 – 00:38:28:	invited to do that, both Andrew and I knew, like we've never, we've never had private personal

00:38:28 – 00:38:32:	conversations about any of this stuff. I can just help like by reading the room, reading the audience,

00:38:32 – 00:38:35:	even if it's an audience of man, one, if it's another man you're interacting with.

00:38:36 – 00:38:41:	It was clear to both of us at the time that I was further to the right on things like race and

00:38:41 – 00:38:47:	in capital and nationalism than he was. And so when he invited me to write on Christian nationalism,

00:38:47 – 00:38:56:	I knew at that time that if I were to make the fully racialist case for the subject that we

00:38:56 – 00:39:01:	made on Stone Choir, he wasn't going to publish it because at the time, at least those were not

00:39:01 – 00:39:06:	his views. And so I didn't want to be antagonistic. It was an honor to be asked to do anything about

00:39:06 – 00:39:10:	a subject that was important to me. So I think we'll link in the show notes the essay that I did

00:39:10 – 00:39:15:	on Christian nationalism. So you can take a look at it if you're interested and maybe contrast it

00:39:15 – 00:39:20:	with some of the things that we say on this episode. I bring this up because it's an example

00:39:20 – 00:39:27:	of being patient in your persuasion. I could have done a couple different things when Andrew came to

00:39:27 – 00:39:32:	me. I could have fought him and said, well, I'm only going to write for you if I get to make the

00:39:32 – 00:39:38:	completely racial case for what nations are. And I'm going to say that America is a white's only

00:39:38 – 00:39:43:	country. And that's going to be the point. If I had done that, he would have flat out said no.

00:39:43 – 00:39:49:	I knew that. And so I didn't. I wasn't going to be antagonistic. Again, when you look at the essay,

00:39:49 – 00:39:55:	everything that I say is entirely true. I was not being deceptive about what I said. However,

00:39:55 – 00:40:00:	I omitted a big chunk of the argument for Christian nationalism by basically just focusing on the

00:40:00 – 00:40:06:	Christian part. I talked about the history. I talked about the state of the West of Christendom

00:40:06 – 00:40:11:	and then the United States in terms of Christianity and a Christian government.

00:40:12 – 00:40:17:	I almost completely omitted any discussion of race because again, I knew it wouldn't be welcome.

00:40:17 – 00:40:24:	I knew there would be too far at that time. So that was an example in my mind of trying to be

00:40:24 – 00:40:29:	effectively persuasive. I did make the case for Christian nationalism on the Christian side.

00:40:29 – 00:40:33:	And there's absolutely a case to be made there. Here's what Christian

00:40:34 – 00:40:39:	nations look like. I completely omitted any discussion of what nation means, which is,

00:40:39 – 00:40:44:	again, the other half of the conversation. And I did that because I knew it wouldn't be welcome.

00:40:45 – 00:40:50:	A few years on, he's saying many of the same things now publicly that I was saying that.

00:40:50 – 00:40:56:	Again, I haven't talked to him, but just based on the other things going on at the time,

00:40:56 – 00:41:00:	I knew they wouldn't be welcome. And so rather than picking a fight with a guy who might already

00:41:00 – 00:41:08:	fought in the past, we got over it, whatever, I chose to bite my tongue and to make the narrow

00:41:08 – 00:41:13:	case that I could make that we could both agree on. I'm not to say that he endorsed 100% of what

00:41:13 – 00:41:18:	I said, but he was willing to publish it pretty much as is. I didn't push any buttons that were

00:41:18 – 00:41:24:	going to alienate the people he wanted to reach at the time. That's persuasion. You can make part

00:41:24 – 00:41:29:	of the case, even knowing that you have other stuff to say. So what does this have to do with

00:41:29 – 00:41:35:	you personally? You don't have to say it all at once. It's fine to just get one or two things out

00:41:35 – 00:41:42:	on the table and let people digest it. A lot of the things that my friends and I were saying

00:41:42 – 00:41:48:	on Gab at the time are things that now Andrew is much more willing to say in public. I don't think

00:41:48 – 00:41:52:	he believed in them. He's more willing to say them now because he realized that we were right.

00:41:53 – 00:41:58:	I'm certainly not taking personal credit for whatever to whatever degree he was persuaded by

00:41:58 – 00:42:03:	anything. I'm simply pointing out the fact that if instead of doing what I did, if I had been

00:42:03 – 00:42:09:	antagonistic, if I had said, unless we go whole hog and do everything that I want us to say, I don't

00:42:09 – 00:42:14:	want any part of it, if you're an aggravating friend, if you're an aggravating ally to someone,

00:42:15 – 00:42:19:	that's a turn off to whatever it is you're trying to convey. If I have a point to make,

00:42:19 – 00:42:25:	I want to make it as gently and persuasively as possible. It's funny for me to say gently because

00:42:25 – 00:42:30:	I think a lot of people assume that Corey and I are bomb throwers. We're bulls in a china shop

00:42:30 – 00:42:36:	just storming through everything that's going on and just leaving wreckage in our wake. That's not

00:42:36 – 00:42:42:	the case, but if you're not giving us a charitable view, particularly if you're just looking at social

00:42:42 – 00:42:48:	media, some people conclude that most of that frankly is reputational. It's not things that

00:42:48 – 00:42:53:	I've done, it's things that people have said about me. Whatever, if I have to worry about what

00:42:53 – 00:42:59:	people are thinking about me, it's a complete waste of time. I worry about people getting these

00:42:59 – 00:43:06:	subjects right. When I was offered the opportunity to make a case for Christian nationalism, I did

00:43:06 – 00:43:11:	the best I could in the constraints that I had at the time. Then when Corey and I had our own

00:43:11 – 00:43:16:	platform here on Stonequire to make a more fleshed out case, particularly for the nation side,

00:43:16 – 00:43:23:	the racial side of Christian nationalism, we made it here. We made it in public in a way that

00:43:23 – 00:43:29:	people who may be read part of it before they've heard it elsewhere, they can come along at their

00:43:29 – 00:43:34:	own pace. I think that's another key element of this, let people come along at their own pace

00:43:34 – 00:43:38:	because you're not trying to fix them. I wasn't trying to fix Andrew or anyone else,

00:43:38 – 00:43:43:	I was just trying to tell the truth. If there's only a portion of it that they can receive

00:43:43 – 00:43:48:	and absorb, it's important to know that and to leave the rest out because if I can give you

00:43:49 – 00:43:53:	one dish that you're really going to like and another dish that I know you're going to hate,

00:43:54 – 00:43:58:	if the goal is for me to get you to eat a dish, I'll give you the one you're going to like.

00:43:58 – 00:44:03:	I can save the broccoli for later, give you the carrots, that's perfectly fine.

00:44:04 – 00:44:07:	We get so excited about trying to convince people and trying to fix them

00:44:07 – 00:44:11:	that we forget that in many cases we didn't believe this stuff a few years ago,

00:44:11 – 00:44:17:	so just be patient, show some grace and give people a chance to come along at their own pace

00:44:17 – 00:44:23:	and leave them as much room as you can. Tell them a truth where you can find common ground

00:44:23 – 00:44:26:	and push them a little bit, give them a little bit more than they're comfortable with,

00:44:26 – 00:44:32:	give them something to think about, but if you try to just waterboard someone and put it down

00:44:32 – 00:44:37:	their throat all at once, you're going to alienate them even with the truth because the manner in

00:44:37 – 00:44:44:	which it's presented is so much worse that who cares what the content is if you're aggravating,

00:44:44 – 00:44:49:	because people don't want anything to do with you. Be patient, have low time preference. We talk

00:44:49 – 00:44:55:	about this all the time in the racial space. There are certain races that have higher or lower

00:44:55 – 00:45:03:	time preference. They're more focused on the future or the current and we must be patient,

00:45:03 – 00:45:08:	we must be focused on the future and knowing telling something to someone that's hard to hear

00:45:08 – 00:45:12:	is probably going to take some time. It might have taken you time to absorb it, it's going to take

00:45:12 – 00:45:18:	them maybe even more time because you have a certain set of give-ins and experiences,

00:45:18 – 00:45:23:	theirs are different. If it takes them twice as long as you, just let it happen. Give them a

00:45:23 – 00:45:29:	little bit, give them what they can digest and then wait and be willing to answer questions in a way

00:45:29 – 00:45:34:	that's not challenging, that doesn't make them feel like you think there's something wrong with them,

00:45:34 – 00:45:38:	that they don't agree with you, just give it time, be patient.

00:45:39 – 00:45:42:	So you're saying that time preference actually matters?

00:45:44 – 00:45:50:	It matters tremendously and in the same people who think that the whites have super low time

00:45:50 – 00:45:55:	preference and we're just the masters of patience, as soon as we learn something new we go nuts and

00:45:55 – 00:45:59:	like, oh I gotta tell everyone right away. It's good to be excited, it's bad to make other people

00:45:59 – 00:46:06:	regret being in the same room with you. I was actually just discussing something tangentially

00:46:06 – 00:46:15:	related to this with someone last night. When you're building an argument, you may very well

00:46:15 – 00:46:22:	have to build the argument in pieces. And there's a tendency for some when it comes to politics or

00:46:22 – 00:46:29:	religion, these hot button issues as it were, to attempt to get someone to believe everything

00:46:29 – 00:46:35:	all at once. And that's just not how things work, that's particularly not how human beings work.

00:46:36 – 00:46:43:	To some degree beliefs and things like that, very few people are going to turn on a dime and go

00:46:43 – 00:46:48:	from believing one thing to believing the diametrically opposed thing. Usually how it

00:46:48 – 00:46:53:	works is more akin to Bayesian updating, which essentially is just a fancy way of saying that

00:46:53 – 00:46:59:	as additional information comes in, the person slowly moves with regard to what he believes about

00:46:59 – 00:47:07:	the issue. And so over time you may get someone to change his position on something, you're probably

00:47:07 – 00:47:14:	not going to get that in one discussion, in one conversation with most people. Some men, yes,

00:47:14 – 00:47:19:	if you present a strong enough case, they'll say, I was wrong previously, I now believe this.

00:47:19 – 00:47:27:	You may encounter some men like that. Not many. Most people take time to change their views,

00:47:27 – 00:47:33:	particularly on important things. And the context in which I was discussing this

00:47:33 – 00:47:40:	with the aforementioned person was basically apologetics. How do you prove the Christian

00:47:40 – 00:47:46:	God is the true God? I'm not going to go into apologetics in depth in this episode, because

00:47:46 – 00:47:51:	I'm sure eventually we'll get around to probably a series of episodes on apologetics, different

00:47:51 – 00:47:58:	arguments for God and things like that. But the core point that I want to draw out of that

00:47:59 – 00:48:07:	is that when you're building the argument for the Christian God, you don't start by arguing

00:48:07 – 00:48:13:	for the Christian God. Particularly if you're dealing with an atheist or an agnostic, if you're

00:48:13 – 00:48:18:	dealing with someone who doesn't even believe in God, you don't start by saying, Jesus is your Lord

00:48:18 – 00:48:24:	and Savior, period. That's not going to get you anywhere. The person is going to stop listening

00:48:24 – 00:48:28:	and probably walk away and probably also be quite annoyed with you and perhaps not listen to you

00:48:28 – 00:48:37:	again. Instead, if you're building up, you build up to that argument by establishing more basic

00:48:37 – 00:48:43:	facts, by laying the groundwork, building a foundation. And you do that by establishing,

00:48:44 – 00:48:50:	well, there's something other than matter. If there's something other than matter,

00:48:50 – 00:48:56:	the universe is not purely material. It's not a materialistic universe. We have to explain

00:48:56 – 00:49:02:	this thing that isn't matter. And then you can get into proving the necessity of the infinite.

00:49:02 – 00:49:08:	Then you can prove that the infinite is personal. The infinite being personal must be God.

00:49:09 – 00:49:15:	And then you can move on from there and build up and build your argument piece by piece and arrive

00:49:15 – 00:49:21:	at the conclusion that the Christian God is the only explanation for the information presented.

00:49:22 – 00:49:28:	But that takes time. That takes patience. That takes multiple interactions with this person.

00:49:28 – 00:49:32:	You're probably not going to go through all of this in one marathon session. Maybe you will.

00:49:32 – 00:49:36:	Maybe you happen to be the kind of person who enjoys that. And if the other person also does,

00:49:36 – 00:49:42:	then by all means talk about it for six hours. But typically speaking, it is going to take

00:49:42 – 00:49:51:	many interactions over a course of days or weeks, months, even years. I have friends where I have

00:49:51 – 00:49:58:	discussed religion and these issues for years with these people. They've slowly changed their

00:49:58 – 00:50:05:	position, but it takes time. And some are more resistant to change than others. My father has

00:50:05 – 00:50:14:	a friend that he has had for, I want to say 30 years almost, who recently became a Christian

00:50:16 – 00:50:24:	after my father had been discussing religion with him for 30 years. Patience matters. These things,

00:50:24 – 00:50:29:	when they're these very important things, are going to be in large part in God's time. That

00:50:29 – 00:50:34:	doesn't mean don't play your role, do your part. Of course, do that. That's your duty as a Christian.

00:50:34 – 00:50:41:	But be patient. Recognize that a lot of these things are to some degree out of your hand.

00:50:43 – 00:50:50:	We're advising you to be effective and to be wise as a serpent. When it comes to the things

00:50:50 – 00:50:55:	that are in your hands, the things that are in your control, don't worry about the things that aren't.

00:50:55 – 00:51:05:	There was one time when Martin Luther was asked why he wasn't more worried about the state

00:51:05 – 00:51:11:	of Christian knowledge amongst supposed Christians and just the general state of Christendom,

00:51:12 – 00:51:19:	and his response was that he put in the work and the outcome was in God's hands and so he

00:51:19 – 00:51:26:	could enjoy his beer with melanchthon. That's the right perspective to have on these things.

00:51:28 – 00:51:31:	And that's why that outcome independence that was mentioned earlier matters.

00:51:33 – 00:51:39:	Do the thing because it is the thing you should do, not because it guarantees a result, because

00:51:39 – 00:51:45:	when it comes to human beings, the result is almost never guaranteed. Particularly when you're

00:51:45 – 00:51:49:	dealing with persuasion, you're dealing with psychology, you're dealing with things

00:51:49 – 00:51:56:	that are very much beyond your control. You can influence these things. You cannot really control

00:51:56 – 00:52:03:	them. So you can make the persuasive argument. You can properly engage with other people.

00:52:04 – 00:52:10:	But if you become obsessed with the outcome, you're actually going to harm your chances of arriving

00:52:10 – 00:52:17:	there because you're going to be obnoxious. If you're constantly insisting, no, you absolutely must

00:52:17 – 00:52:24:	believe this specific conclusion. And yes, that's sort of what social media and certain

00:52:25 – 00:52:32:	fora tend to encourage, that it brings it out of a certain personality type. I willingly admit that

00:52:32 – 00:52:39:	I engage in some of that sometimes. But there's a time and a place. Engaging on Twitter again,

00:52:39 – 00:52:44:	general audience, you probably don't know most of those people personally. You're going to engage

00:52:44 – 00:52:50:	differently from how you engage with a family member or a close friend or someone you met at a bar.

00:52:51 – 00:52:59:	Stranger, what have you. So know your audience. When you know your audience and you aren't

00:53:00 – 00:53:05:	so hyper focused on the outcome that you can just be a person and have a conversation,

00:53:06 – 00:53:15:	you are going to be so much more effective than if you are just hyper laser focused on that outcome

00:53:16 – 00:53:23:	and driving people away because you're being abrasive. If you're being abrasive or obnoxious,

00:53:23 – 00:53:29:	you are going to be less effective. That's just the fact of the matter. Yes, it's about the truth,

00:53:29 – 00:53:36:	ultimately. The truth matters. But your goal is to get people to believe the truth. Hopefully,

00:53:36 – 00:53:40:	that's your goal. That's not your goal, then it's manipulation and you're doing something you should

00:53:40 – 00:53:47:	stop. But if your goal is to get people to believe the truth, then yes, you are absolutely correct

00:53:47 – 00:53:55:	to say, think and believe that the truth matters. But that's not the end of it. Because you have to

00:53:55 – 00:54:01:	have a way. You have to know how to get people to that truth. And you can't get them to the truth.

00:54:02 – 00:54:07:	If all you do is just keep insisting, this is the truth and you must believe it. You have to

00:54:07 – 00:54:12:	know how to get to the truth. And that's where what we're discussing in this episode comes in.

00:54:13 – 00:54:21:	That's where persuasion matters. How do you get from where you are to where you need to be?

00:54:21 – 00:54:27:	How do you get other people to join you in going to where they need to be?

00:54:28 – 00:54:34:	Where is the truth? How do we get there? Another big part of persuasion is having

00:54:34 – 00:54:42:	that degree of confidence, not necessarily in yourself, but in your beliefs. We did the episode

00:54:42 – 00:54:47:	on the fear of the Lord I talked about when I had a stroke and my confidence in God and the fact

00:54:47 – 00:54:55:	that that's not me, that's not my faith doing something because I chose it for it to do that.

00:54:55 – 00:55:01:	That was God giving me a gift and taking care of me when I needed it. And I only mention it then,

00:55:01 – 00:55:08:	I only mention it now because it's an example of how when we have genuine confidence in the promises

00:55:08 – 00:55:14:	of the one true God, it's something from outside us that doesn't, it gives us a sort of supreme

00:55:14 – 00:55:20:	confidence that in the liturgy it's described as the peace of God which passes all understanding.

00:55:21 – 00:55:28:	That sort of absolute assurance in a belief. And I'm not saying that everything that you

00:55:28 – 00:55:33:	believe about all these material things should have the same degree of confidence as your

00:55:33 – 00:55:38:	confidence in your faith. Our faith should be paramount. And so there are a lot of aspects

00:55:38 – 00:55:44:	of this episode that go to sharing the gospel, but they also equally apply to sharing other things.

00:55:45 – 00:55:50:	Regardless of what we're sharing, when we're confident in what we're saying, that comes across.

00:55:50 – 00:55:56:	And there's a mixture of, there's a balancing act between the confidence in what we have to say

00:55:56 – 00:56:02:	and the desire for others to believe it. Corey's father's friend, after 30 years,

00:56:03 – 00:56:09:	regardless of the arguments that his dad made to him, the fact that he still cared enough and

00:56:09 – 00:56:17:	loved him enough and didn't give an inch of ground on the subject, all by itself was a testimony to

00:56:17 – 00:56:22:	his faith to the fact that there was something real there. Because that sort of persistence

00:56:23 – 00:56:29:	is rarely found where falsehood is found. People don't die with the lie, not in real life.

00:56:30 – 00:56:34:	You know, if you're trying to trick someone, you might try to go down with a ship for

00:56:34 – 00:56:40:	something to gain some advantage, but only if you actually believe something will you stick to it

00:56:40 – 00:56:48:	when you have nothing else left to cling to. And so as we look to be persuasive, it's not about

00:56:48 – 00:56:52:	winning arguments. I think that's one of the key things. It's not about winning arguments on the

00:56:52 – 00:56:58:	internet or in person or anything else. It's not about winning. It's about if you have the truth,

00:56:58 – 00:57:03:	any truth, and someone else is missing it. The problem you're trying to solve

00:57:03 – 00:57:09:	is to convey that truth to them in a way that they'll actually receive it. And again,

00:57:09 – 00:57:14:	that may take patience. It may take a particularly rational argument. It depends on whom you're

00:57:14 – 00:57:19:	speaking with. Different men will respond differently to different types of arguments.

00:57:19 – 00:57:25:	And so in some cases for some individuals, maybe you're not up to it. And that's fine. You know,

00:57:25 – 00:57:32:	a lot of people are not equipped to make the fully sound convincing argument for something

00:57:32 – 00:57:40:	to any random man. You know, if there's a blue collar guy who's a machinist in his spare time,

00:57:40 – 00:57:46:	he does small engine repair. He probably doesn't worry about any of this crap. And God bless him

00:57:46 – 00:57:52:	for it. I wish the more people didn't have to worry about these things. The reason that a man like

00:57:52 – 00:57:58:	that becomes the battle space is that while he is blessed by not paying attention to any of this

00:57:58 – 00:58:04:	stuff, many of the subjects that we've discussed in the past episodes are still floating around in

00:58:04 – 00:58:11:	the ambient world. And so he's absorbing bits of pieces. And some of those things have been

00:58:11 – 00:58:17:	deliberately inserted into the world that he's only barely paying attention to in order to

00:58:17 – 00:58:23:	encircle him and limit the options for his kids, his community, his schools, whatever.

00:58:24 – 00:58:30:	He has fewer options. He has fewer legitimate moral choices in the world's morality,

00:58:30 – 00:58:34:	because of the things that we talk about. So while he's not paying attention to it,

00:58:36 – 00:58:39:	maybe there's a time and a place where you would have a small piece of the discussion

00:58:39 – 00:58:46:	with such a man and say, Hey, did you care about X, Y, and Z in the news? I think that this is what's

00:58:46 – 00:58:51:	going on. I learned this other bit. I think we connect A to B. There's a picture there.

00:58:52 – 00:58:55:	The guy who's not going to pay much attention, maybe you can make a case to him. And maybe

00:58:55 – 00:59:00:	that's all you do. Maybe all he's worried about is the local schools where his kids go and he wants

00:59:00 – 00:59:07:	his kids to turn out as decent human beings as everyone does. You don't need to make a full case

00:59:07 – 00:59:12:	to every single person. You need to make the necessary case to make sure that they can't be

00:59:13 – 00:59:18:	used against you. They can't be weaponized to harm what's around them. And for some people,

00:59:18 – 00:59:22:	that's the whole hog. There are some people that are sufficiently engaged. They're

00:59:22 – 00:59:27:	sufficiently persuasive to others that if they're missing out on something,

00:59:28 – 00:59:34:	it's important for someone to reach them. When I was on Myth of the 20th Century,

00:59:34 – 00:59:38:	one of the questions that Hans asked me was if I could recommend any books on Christian nationalism.

00:59:38 – 00:59:43:	And I mentioned Torba and Boniface Options' book and Stephen Wolf's book. And I said,

00:59:43 – 00:59:48:	I hadn't read them. And I think maybe I was a bit uncharitable to those books. Because I hadn't

00:59:48 – 00:59:53:	read them, the only impressions I had of them were of the things that those men have said

59:54 – 01:00:00
since they came out over the last year or so. And my impression was that the arguments that

01:00:00 – 01:00:05:	they were making were essentially civic nationalist arguments, arguments that

01:00:06 – 01:00:11:	blood doesn't matter, that nations are countries, and therefore it's a legal entity. That was the

01:00:11 – 01:00:17:	impression I had. If that was wrong, I apologize. Certainly lately, some of their comments are

01:00:17 – 01:00:24:	much closer to the things that we're saying. I'm thankful for that. Again, I highlight that to say

01:00:24 – 01:00:30:	that I think that when those books came out, they were making another part of the argument for

01:00:30 – 01:00:34:	Christian nationalism. Just as I did in the original essay, there was a lot more to say than

01:00:34 – 01:00:40:	what I said. It's perfectly legitimate to make part of the argument if it's part that you can

01:00:41 – 01:00:46:	gain credibility with and you can make credibly. The reason that I highlighted the distinction

01:00:46 – 01:00:53:	between my overtly racial view of Christian nationalism on Myth of the 20th Century with

01:00:53 – 01:00:59:	Adam was that I know that much of his audience is not Christian or not particularly engaged.

01:01:00 – 01:01:07:	What they see coming from within the church is a completely pan-nationalist, essentially

01:01:07 – 01:01:12:	universalism, that all human beings are completely interchangeable, borders are evil,

01:01:13 – 01:01:20:	countries should be subsumed by basically NGOs, just unifying us as one human mass of

01:01:22 – 01:01:28:	charity cases. It's just all the horrors that Soros is producing, especially in Europe, because

01:01:28 – 01:01:33:	guys can walk or take a boat from Africa into Europe. It's harder to get them here. They have

01:01:33 – 01:01:40:	to walk up from Mexico. I wanted to specifically highlight to his audience that there's an

01:01:40 – 01:01:47:	explicitly racial case that is a fundamental case, in my view, of the Christian nationalist argument,

01:01:47 – 01:01:53:	because I don't want people to think the only way to be Christian is to say that all states must

01:01:53 – 01:02:00:	collapse, that all borders must be destroyed, that all people must be wiped out by virtue of

01:02:00 – 01:02:04:	interbreeding, that you take every race, you mix it with every other race until we're all the same

01:02:04 – 01:02:10:	color, we have no differentiating features whatsoever. There are a lot of people in the church

01:02:10 – 01:02:15:	saying precisely that. If I was uncharitable or if I was inaccurate, I apologize to them.

01:02:16 – 01:02:19:	I was trying to specifically make the case that there's absolutely

01:02:20 – 01:02:27:	a racial view in Scripture of nations. It's synonymous. It's synonymous in the law,

01:02:27 – 01:02:32:	in the 1790s in this country. It's synonymous 2000 years earlier in Scripture. The reason that

01:02:32 – 01:02:39:	there's not much discussion of race and Christian history is it was so obvious. There's no theology

01:02:39 – 01:02:43:	for us to go back to and borrow from the past when men were more intelligent about making these

01:02:43 – 01:02:50:	arguments, because this wasn't the fight. The fight in previous centuries was about other doctrines.

01:02:51 – 01:02:59:	Today, when Satan moves the fight to being about race, about genes, about borders,

01:02:59 – 01:03:05:	about the created body, male and female, two sexes, not infinite sexes, disparate races,

01:03:05 – 01:03:12:	distinct races, not some just sea of humanity that's indistinguishable, those are the two sides

01:03:12 – 01:03:19:	that they're the most important for me to defend. Back to my point earlier about Andrew,

01:03:19 – 01:03:23:	if I had attacked him at the time and said, no, we must make the racialist case,

01:03:23 – 01:03:28:	or there's no case at all, I don't think that he would necessarily be where he is today.

01:03:28 – 01:03:32:	Again, I'm not taking credit for that. I'm just saying I could have very easily done harm

01:03:33 – 01:03:39:	to my views by being a jerk about it. If I had argued and picked a fight, in fact,

01:03:39 – 01:03:44:	I left Gab about a year later, or maybe not too long after. For unrelated reasons,

01:03:44 – 01:03:49:	I was very frustrated with some business choices he had made, some moderation choices,

01:03:49 – 01:03:58:	some culture choices on Gab. I made a strategic decision about persuasion not to fling mud at him,

01:03:58 – 01:04:02:	because although I disagreed with the things that he was doing on his platform,

01:04:02 – 01:04:07:	not mine, he's the boss, he owns it, he can do what he wants with it. I strongly disagreed with

01:04:07 – 01:04:11:	some of the things that he did and I kept my mouth shut. The reason I did that,

01:04:11 – 01:04:15:	the reason I didn't go after him when I was pissed off and I was disappointed, was that

01:04:16 – 01:04:20:	despite my differences with him about how he was running his business and some of those strategic

01:04:20 – 01:04:26:	decisions, he was still doing very good work and things that mattered to me. I knew that alienating

01:04:26 – 01:04:32:	him and being a jerk, being the guy who's sniping at someone, would make anything that I'm saying

01:04:32 – 01:04:39:	elsewhere a turn off to him. I highly am in particular because he has influence,

01:04:39 – 01:04:46:	he has much more influence than we have. We're not ankle biters and we're not trying to ride

01:04:46 – 01:04:51:	coattails, but if there are people, there are certain people in the world who have bully

01:04:51 – 01:04:57:	pulpits, there are people who have influence over more people than you do. If you're in a position

01:04:57 – 01:05:02:	where you can influence someone who's more influential than you, it's really important to

01:05:02 – 01:05:07:	get it right and part of that is not making them regret listening to you. I didn't go after him

01:05:07 – 01:05:12:	despite the fact that I was frustrated at the time. I pretty much kept my mouth shut publicly

01:05:12 – 01:05:16:	other than saying a couple things that were limited to the scope of that because he's doing

01:05:16 – 01:05:22:	really good work. I saw the trajectory and I hope that he would continue to, for lack of a better

01:05:22 – 01:05:28:	term, move to the right and he has. He's saying a lot of the things today on Twitter and on Gab

01:05:28 – 01:05:34:	that were on the verge of getting people banned from Gab a few years ago. People change, people's

01:05:34 – 01:05:41:	views change and sometimes being persuasive is just biting your tongue. One of the most persuasive

01:05:41 – 01:05:47:	things that I did in that particular situation was not to be antagonistic about something that

01:05:47 – 01:05:52:	wasn't a big ticket item. They had to do with this platform, but it didn't have to do with the

01:05:52 – 01:06:00:	larger project that I saw as allies. I want this to be a Christian nation. I want his kids to grow

01:06:00 – 01:06:04:	up in a place where they're not going to be persecuted for the fact that they're white.

01:06:05 – 01:06:10:	That's important to me. I don't have kids on my own. I never will. The only thing that I can do

01:06:10 – 01:06:15:	is effectively to fight for other people's kids in their world. I don't get anything out of any of

01:06:15 – 01:06:21:	this. One of the things that Adam mentioned to me after doing the podcast was that he sees the

01:06:21 – 01:06:26:	treatment that Corey and I have received at the hands of the church as part of our persuasion to

01:06:26 – 01:06:32:	him. He can tell that we are sincere because we're being treated like crap by some of the people he

01:06:32 – 01:06:38:	sees as being detrimental to the world. I apologize if I'm speaking out of turn by saying something

01:06:38 – 01:06:43:	he said to me private, but that is a common view that I think a lot of people have. Corey and I

01:06:43 – 01:06:49:	understand that instinctively. We also understand it explicitly from all the conversations we've had

01:06:49 – 01:06:55:	with these men. There are a lot of men on the right who don't have a church. They don't know God.

01:06:55 – 01:07:02:	They see ontological evil in the world and they're looking for where people talk about ontological

01:07:02 – 01:07:07:	good. That should be the church. It is the church. Yet Corey and I are two of the only men in the

01:07:07 – 01:07:13:	world who can speak to men like Adam and say, look, there's a Christian case to be made for not

01:07:13 – 01:07:18:	destroying your race in your nation, in your country. There's a Christian case for that.

01:07:18 – 01:07:22:	There's a moral case. There's a secular case too. I want there to be a Christian voice in those

01:07:23 – 01:07:30:	conversations. If you're persuasive in a way that makes you, someone people are willing to listen to,

01:07:30 – 01:07:35:	you're given the opportunities to say more than maybe you would have just said on your own.

01:07:36 – 01:07:40:	If we were the bomb throwers that people say we are, he wouldn't want to talk to me. I'd just be

01:07:40 – 01:07:48:	another crazy guy on the internet. If you can seem calm and persuasive and relaxed and not worry

01:07:48 – 01:07:54:	about what people think, people care more about what you think. It's one of the many ironies of

01:07:54 – 01:08:01:	the way the human psychology works. We're convinced by people who don't care if they're convincing,

01:08:01 – 01:08:05:	more than we're convinced by people who really want to be convincing. It's not an act on the

01:08:05 – 01:08:11:	part of Cory and myself. I want you to believe because it's true. I frequently say if we never

01:08:11 – 01:08:16:	get any credit, fine, whatever. We never wanted to do this in the first place. We didn't want to

01:08:16 – 01:08:21:	start a podcast. We did it because we felt that no one else was speaking to these matters.

01:08:22 – 01:08:27:	The subject of credibility, if you go back and look at the arc of episodes on Stone Choir,

01:08:27 – 01:08:31:	we waited until we were six, eight months in until we got into some of the really

01:08:32 – 01:08:37:	controversial so-called subjects. That was conscious. That was deliberate on our part.

01:08:37 – 01:08:43:	If we had begun on episode one talking about Africans and Jews and these other things that

01:08:43 – 01:08:47:	get people so angry, we would have just been the podcast that talks about really angering,

01:08:47 – 01:08:54:	controversial subjects. That's not us. There's a lot of things to talk about. It's fine to tailor

01:08:54 – 01:09:00:	the message, narrow it down, and make your point, and then wait. Let the point do its work. Then

01:09:00 – 01:09:04:	you come back later and see if anything's growing and find out if it was rocky soil

01:09:04 – 01:09:11:	or if it was fertile soil. You never know. It's the truth that gives the growth to the message.

01:09:13 – 01:09:17:	It's ultimately not how persuasive you are. Really, a lot of persuasion is just

01:09:17 – 01:09:23:	not getting in the way by your own stumbling and getting in the way of the truth that you're trying

01:09:23 – 01:09:31:	to convey to others. When it comes to making these arguments, particularly about complex or

01:09:32 – 01:09:39:	central, very important subjects, you should always bear in mind that you may not be the person

01:09:40 – 01:09:45:	who actually makes the final part of the argument. You may even not make the majority

01:09:45 – 01:09:51:	of the argument. You may just put one brick in place. You may add one building block.

01:09:52 – 01:09:58:	You may be the one who lays part of the foundation. You're building part of the argument for that

01:09:58 – 01:10:05:	person. Don't necessarily feel that you have to be the one to make the entirety of the argument.

01:10:05 – 01:10:09:	Now, if it's a family member or a close friend, maybe you will be the person who makes

01:10:09 – 01:10:15:	the rest of the argument as well, but you may be discussing something with

01:10:15 – 01:10:20:	someone you met at a coffee shop and you may lay the foundation for someone else to come in and

01:10:20 – 01:10:24:	make the rest of that argument in the future. So don't think that necessarily just because you

01:10:24 – 01:10:30:	didn't get to whatever ultimate conclusion you think you should have been able to make that

01:10:30 – 01:10:39:	what you did was ineffective or useless. It probably was not. Human beings work by building up

01:10:39 – 01:10:43:	information over the course of a lifetime. So all of those interactions matter.

01:10:44 – 01:10:51:	It may be that your role is just to add that one brick. Don't necessarily feel that that's

01:10:51 – 01:10:57:	unimportant. Go ahead and find a wall if you're so inclined and start pulling random bricks out

01:10:57 – 01:11:03:	and see what happens. They all matter. Every little piece matters. I'm not actually telling you to go

01:11:03 – 01:11:10:	pick apart your neighbor's wall. Don't do that. Only your own wall. But there's another point

01:11:11 – 01:11:16:	in all of this that I feel it's important to make explicit. We've sort of implied it throughout the

01:11:16 – 01:11:23:	episode so far, but fundamentally, you will never persuade anyone of anything.

01:11:24 – 01:11:28:	Now, what I mean by that is something very specific.

01:11:30 – 01:11:39:	No one is persuaded by someone else. Because ultimately, how it works is the other person

01:11:39 – 01:11:44:	takes in the information, takes in the argument, data, whatever it is that you are providing,

01:11:45 – 01:11:53:	synthesizes that himself and he persuades himself. Now, for some men, it may be that your argument

01:11:53 – 01:11:57:	is the one that he takes, makes his own and persuades himself given your argument.

01:11:59 – 01:12:04:	Now, it's a subtle point. It seems like a minor point. It's almost on the level of Kant's point

01:12:04 – 01:12:09:	about the thing in itself versus the thing as we perceive it with the senses. But it's a salient

01:12:09 – 01:12:18:	point. What you are doing is providing that other person with the necessary means to construct

01:12:18 – 01:12:23:	what he needs to arrive at the conclusion. And that's why it's important to know your audience.

01:12:23 – 01:12:27:	That's why it's important to know the person with whom you're speaking because you'll know what he

01:12:27 – 01:12:33:	needs to construct that argument for himself, the one that will convince him, that will persuade him.

01:12:34 – 01:12:41:	Because ultimately, that is an internal matter to the person. Persuasion happens in the psyche,

01:12:41 – 01:12:46:	as it were, in the mind of the person being persuaded. It doesn't happen externally.

01:12:46 – 01:12:52:	Yes, the information is provided externally, the argumentation in some cases, the data,

01:12:53 – 01:12:58:	whatever it may be. But the ultimate persuasion is an internal matter.

01:12:59 – 01:13:04:	And that is again why knowing your audience, having that relationship, having that built-up

01:13:04 – 01:13:11:	trust truly matters, because then the person can take what you are giving him and construct the

01:13:11 – 01:13:17:	case himself. Because ultimately, he is the one doing that final construction in his own mind.

01:13:18 – 01:13:25:	So yes, you can be persuasive, but the ultimate act of persuasion lies in the mind of the person

01:13:25 – 01:13:32:	persuading, in this case, persuading himself. The last big point that I want to make is a

01:13:33 – 01:13:39:	corollary to that. Something happened in the last few years, really in the universe,

01:13:39 – 01:13:47:	I think we've all felt it, between COVID and the BLM riots. I think everyone has a sense that

01:13:47 – 01:13:55:	there's been a shift somehow metaphysically. And one of the things that happened, both in COVID and

01:13:55 – 01:14:04:	with BLM, is that the divisions within families, within communities, within friendships became

01:14:04 – 01:14:11:	much more apparent. Or in some cases, where there was previously no division, now there is division.

01:14:12 – 01:14:19:	The important thing that I want to highlight in the case of COVID and BLM, and all the associated

01:14:19 – 01:14:25:	screaming, is that when those divisions occurred in what had formally seemed to be cohesive units,

01:14:25 – 01:14:33:	in some cases those congregations were split by COVID policies, or COVID fears, or COVID messaging,

01:14:33 – 01:14:41:	whatever. We, on the right, the people who are right about these things, should never be the ones

01:14:41 – 01:14:49:	who are causing the division for the sake of accusation. What I mean by that is if you look

01:14:49 – 01:14:56:	back at BLM and COVID, it was the people on the left who by and large became utterly hysterical,

01:14:57 – 01:15:03:	and filled with condemnation and rage at anyone who wouldn't comply. It seemed like there

01:15:03 – 01:15:09:	was an entirely new emergent religion that appeared almost fully formed in the span of like

01:15:09 – 01:15:16:	six months. And in that time, the adherents to that new religion were vicious to anyone who

01:15:16 – 01:15:25:	would not bend the knee to it, literally bending the knee in the case of the BLM crap. Those were

01:15:25 – 01:15:31:	the people who were cutting us out of their lives. Those are the people who if we had to cut them out

01:15:31 – 01:15:37:	of our lives, it was usually self-defense. It was usually actual fear that these people who had

01:15:37 – 01:15:43:	once been friends or maybe even family had now become a real potential physical threat to you

01:15:43 – 01:15:49:	or your family. And so if you did cut them off, it was almost certainly defensive. And it wasn't

01:15:49 – 01:15:54:	simply, I hate this guy because he's wrong about something. And so the last point I want to make

01:15:54 – 01:16:01:	is that we on the right are not the ones who isolate people and disparage them for being wrong.

01:16:02 – 01:16:06:	If you have someone that you love, someone you're friends with, some of your neighbors with,

01:16:06 – 01:16:11:	and they're wrong about something, that's a matter of Christian love and concern. You want them to

01:16:11 – 01:16:18:	be right. You want to help move them in the right direction. But because it is rooted in love and not

01:16:18 – 01:16:24:	rooted in wanting to win an argument, you never get to the point that you say,

01:16:24 – 01:16:29:	I hate you because you don't agree with me. I want nothing to do with you because you believe

01:16:29 – 01:16:35:	the wrong thing about this. That's not us. That's not what we on the right do. That's not how truth

01:16:35 – 01:16:41:	behaves. Yeah, Corey and I can tell you don't believe a word we say, go read for yourself.

01:16:41 – 01:16:45:	And we know you're going to come to the same conclusions in part because we don't want you

01:16:45 – 01:16:50:	to be persuaded by podcasters or by people writing articles or people writing books.

01:16:50 – 01:16:55:	You shouldn't be persuaded by the guy who makes the loudest, angriest, whatever argument. You

01:16:55 – 01:17:02:	should be persuaded by truth. And so when we do these meta episodes, we want to get people engaging

01:17:02 – 01:17:08:	in metacognition about thinking about thinking about truth. What are you thinking about? How do

01:17:08 – 01:17:14:	you incorporate the ideas that you hear into what you believe? Because it's a two step process.

01:17:14 – 01:17:19:	You hear something, you think about it. If you believe it, it becomes much more intrinsic.

01:17:20 – 01:17:26:	What we saw with COVID and BLM is that they kind of skipped the truth part and just went straight

01:17:26 – 01:17:32:	to the belief part. And so a religion emerged with nothing behind it except for these fictional

01:17:32 – 01:17:42:	fantasy stories. And the religious fervor that was used to target us was horribly divisive.

01:17:42 – 01:17:46:	Again, it divided families, it divided communities and congregations in terrible ways.

01:17:47 – 01:17:54:	And we should never be the ones who are causing that. So if your friends with someone and you're

01:17:54 – 01:18:01:	further to the right than them, never go after them, certainly publicly, for not being as right as

01:18:01 – 01:18:06:	you are for being wrong about something that you're right about. Don't tone beliefs the way they

01:18:06 – 01:18:14:	say things. It's funny, people think that I'm a bomb thrower on Twitter, not to the same degree

01:18:14 – 01:18:19:	as Corey, but people think that we're both antagonistic. If you actually look at me replying

01:18:19 – 01:18:26:	to other people's accounts, I very, very rarely say anything negative in someone else's replies.

01:18:26 – 01:18:32:	Usually if I reply to someone and I disagree, it's A, it's a mutual. B, I'm very respectful.

01:18:32 – 01:18:38:	And C, I'm trying to make a narrow point. I'm trying to nudge things a little bit. But I never

01:18:38 – 01:18:43:	look at someone's timelines. I never look at their statements and say, I got to fix what

01:18:43 – 01:18:48:	they're saying. They got something wrong. But it's their timeline. It's their space to make

01:18:48 – 01:18:54:	their point about whatever they want to talk about. Sometimes I can contribute something

01:18:54 – 01:18:57:	helpful. Sometimes I can contribute. I want to nudge in a slightly different direction because

01:18:57 – 01:19:01:	the thing will be helpful to them in what they're actually trying to say.

01:19:02 – 01:19:07:	The important point that I want people to take home is that if you see someone making a mistake

01:19:07 – 01:19:15:	wherever and in conversation on social media, your first instinct shouldn't be, I got to fix this.

01:19:15 – 01:19:20:	You've said that all along. Your friends, your family especially are not people you should be

01:19:20 – 01:19:26:	fixing. They're people you should be loving. And loving them involves helping them at some point

01:19:26 – 01:19:31:	get some of these things right. But if there's someone who's friends with you or friends with

01:19:31 – 01:19:38:	your sphere of friends, particularly if you're the undesirables, as Corey and I are, social

01:19:38 – 01:19:42:	media is very interesting because anyone can interact with anyone. You can reply to Elon Musk

01:19:42 – 01:19:49:	and he may see it. That's incredible. That's completely insane. On Gab, it's a smaller space.

01:19:49 – 01:19:55:	You can respond and or he's likely to see it because it's a much more tight-knit community,

01:19:55 – 01:20:00:	which is one of the awesome things about it. It's a community. It's a town square. It's not

01:20:00 – 01:20:05:	like a global billboard. That's a different culture and that's a good thing. The internet needs

01:20:05 – 01:20:12:	multiple different cultures. On the internet, if someone says something and you disagree with it,

01:20:12 – 01:20:18:	it's okay to let it go. You don't constantly have to fix everything around you. And so

01:20:19 – 01:20:24:	because other people can interact completely at random on Twitter especially because it's so large,

01:20:25 – 01:20:29:	it's very conspicuous to me especially in the last few months just kind of looking at

01:20:29 – 01:20:36:	own interactions. Who is willing to still talk to me because there's been such a concerted slander

01:20:36 – 01:20:42:	campaign against Corey and myself and against Stone Choir that a lot of people just refuse to

01:20:42 – 01:20:47:	acknowledge we exist anymore. Even some who will speak in private won't speak to us in public because

01:20:47 – 01:20:52:	they're downsized to them. And I respect that. I don't go after these people in public. I'm not

01:20:52 – 01:20:56:	naming them here. I'm not trying to shame anyone by mentioning this. I'm simply highlighting that

01:20:57 – 01:21:03:	there are people who are still willing to follow me, who are willing to respond, reply to me and

01:21:03 – 01:21:09:	engage with me in public. I respect the fact that they're taking a chance to even be seen

01:21:09 – 01:21:15:	interacting favorably. There are multiple parables in scripture about engaging with the

01:21:15 – 01:21:22:	public. You have lepers. You have these text collectors. You have undesirables of the lowest

01:21:22 – 01:21:30:	order and the manner in which they were treated in those days. Today, being on the dissident

01:21:30 – 01:21:35:	right is basically being part of a leper colony. And it's artificial. I mean, it's not leprosy.

01:21:35 – 01:21:41:	Leprosy was a highly contagious, hideous disease. It was incurable. Leprosy colonies existed because

01:21:41 – 01:21:46:	those people had to be set apart not only because ceremonially they were unclean, but because they

01:21:46 – 01:21:53:	had a horrific, contagious disease. There's no contagion among the dissident right. There's

01:21:53 – 01:21:57:	only people who are telling the truth, and then other people are afraid to go near them because

01:21:57 – 01:22:03:	of it. So I highlight this because if there's someone who's willing to actually still talk to me

01:22:03 – 01:22:09:	publicly, I respect that and I respect them for it. And part of my respect for that is that I'm

01:22:09 – 01:22:14:	going to engage with them as little as possible because I don't want to bring heat on them by

01:22:14 – 01:22:19:	speaking to them because there are people who hate me so much that they're sitting in the telegram

01:22:19 – 01:22:24:	public chat for Stone Choir trying to dox pastors and laymen. If anyone they can find,

01:22:24 – 01:22:31:	they want to dox them and go to their congregations and try to get them destroyed because they hate

01:22:31 – 01:22:36:	the fact that we are speaking so much. Why do they hate it? They hate it because we are the men

01:22:36 – 01:22:41:	who are actually able to talk to men like Adam and men like Andrew from different perspectives

01:22:41 – 01:22:47:	and help them move in a direction that's closer to the truth. And it's a truth that's completely

01:22:47 – 01:22:52:	at odds with the world. And there's servants of the world that passionately hate that and will

01:22:52 – 01:22:58:	spare no expense of, and they'll take any amount of time to try to harm us and anyone who comes near

01:22:58 – 01:23:03:	us. So if someone is not willing to come near me publicly, I notice, I absolutely notice,

01:23:03 – 01:23:08:	I'm really good at pattern recognition. If you used to talk to me and you don't anymore,

01:23:08 – 01:23:13:	I can tell. And I don't care. If there's anything to forgive, I certainly forgive it.

01:23:13 – 01:23:17:	But it is conspicuous when someone's willing to talk to me. I mention this because if there's

01:23:17 – 01:23:22:	someone who's still willing to engage with the men who are treated as lepers and as tax collectors,

01:23:23 – 01:23:28:	don't make them regret it. Don't make their lives harder because they're one of the few people who

01:23:28 – 01:23:33:	are willing to actually treat us like Christian brothers and like human beings.

01:23:34 – 01:23:40:	If you hold views that are not popular, if you hold views that are contrary to the world's religion,

01:23:40 – 01:23:47:	and someone is willing to engage with you, make sure they don't regret it. That's one of the chief

01:23:47 – 01:23:51:	messages of this episode. Make sure that when you're trying to persuade someone, sometimes it's

01:23:51 – 01:23:56:	just as simple as, I'm not going to be a jerk. I'm not going to make your life any harder than it

01:23:56 – 01:24:03:	already is because you have your own thing to focus on. That's important too, to not be the guy

01:24:03 – 01:24:09:	that someone regrets that they were friends with because that's a way to lose friends and negatively

01:24:09 – 01:24:15:	influence people. I mentioned the Andrew example earlier on. If I had gone after him and bet a

01:24:15 – 01:24:20:	complete jerk, he would have very rightfully ignored some of the things I said and maybe he

01:24:20 – 01:24:25:	wouldn't think what he does now. Even maybe if only for the sake that he didn't want to be associated

01:24:25 – 01:24:30:	with someone who would be as much of a jerk as me. Sometimes you just have to shut your mouth and

01:24:30 – 01:24:37:	let someone be wrong on the internet. It's not the end of the world. It may be that by being silent,

01:24:37 – 01:24:41:	in the future, you're buying a chance to make the persuasive case that you didn't have

01:24:41 – 01:24:48:	the opportunity to make in that moment. Patience, grace are the key elements of persuasion.

01:24:48 – 01:24:52:	Sometimes just saying nothing is the most powerful thing you could say. In some part of that is just

01:24:52 – 01:24:57:	still being a friend, like Corey's father, who was friends for a man because they were friends

01:24:57 – 01:25:02:	and the fact that the man wouldn't receive the gospel didn't dissuade him from being his friend

01:25:02 – 01:25:07:	or for continuing to talk about it. Being friends with people who have different views

01:25:07 – 01:25:13:	is a testimony to the confidence that you have in your own beliefs. Don't let your beliefs become

01:25:13 – 01:25:19:	an excuse for you to be brittle. Truth never causes brittleness. It causes strength. Wherever

01:25:19 – 01:25:25:	you find strength, especially today when there are men with convictions, people who don't know

01:25:25 – 01:25:31:	anything will see strength being upheld in the face of adversity and think maybe there's some

01:25:31 – 01:25:36:	truth behind that because there has to be some metaphysical explanation for how someone could

01:25:36 – 01:25:42:	withstand the hatred of the world. Maybe he's just completely crazy or maybe he's on to something.

01:25:43 – 01:25:47:	Maybe all you do as a personal witness to the world is acting in his example who says,

01:25:47 – 01:25:52:	I'm still here. You can't chase me away. If that's the only persuasion you can do,

01:25:52 – 01:25:56:	that's a powerful message because there's so few men today who are willing to do that.

01:25:59 – 01:26:04:	There's a lot to think about here. It's a meta discussion around how we interact with each other

01:26:04 – 01:26:11:	and how we think about ourselves. Be patient. It's okay to be quiet. Measure twice, cut once.

01:26:12 – 01:26:18:	Think before you go after someone, anywhere. Even think before you tell them the things

01:26:18 – 01:26:22:	that we talk about on Stunkwire or wherever else you're getting your interesting information.

01:26:23 – 01:26:28:	Don't be hasty to try to upend someone else's life because even if it's beneficial,

01:26:28 – 01:26:34:	it may well upend things. Have some empathy for that and have some grace for that person

01:26:34 – 01:26:39:	to try to go easy and to make it easy for them. If they want nothing to do with it,

01:26:39 – 01:26:43:	you should still love them because whatever relationship you had beforehand should still

01:26:43 – 01:26:49:	exist. If they respond the way people did with COVID and BLM by writing you off,

01:26:50 – 01:26:56:	well, that was part of Jesus' prophecies of end times, that fathers would be adversaries against

01:26:56 – 01:27:00:	daughters, mothers and sons, daughter-in-laws and father-in-laws and butchering the relationships.

01:27:00 – 01:27:06:	Like Jesus basically covered everything. Families will be torn down. Churches will be torn down

01:27:06 – 01:27:11:	internally, not just externally. Whether or not this is an end time moment,

01:27:11 – 01:27:15:	the fact that these things are happening are always a reminder to us to believe

01:27:15 – 01:27:20:	God's promises because they will come true one day. When we see them happening,

01:27:20 – 01:27:24:	it's not a cause for panic or worry. It's just a cause for making sure that we focus

01:27:24 – 01:27:27:	on the things that matter most. Chief of all, that's God and His promises,

01:27:27 – 01:27:41:	and that includes the truth of all things in creation.