Asatru Folk Assembly - 5⧸28⧸25 Victory Never Sleeps, Episode 151 - Marriage and Relationships

00:00:00.000 Transcribed by ESO, translated by —

00:00:30.000 Transcription by CastingWords

00:01:00.000 Thank you.

00:01:30.000 Thank you.

00:02:00.000 We'll be right back.

00:02:30.000 Thank you.

00:03:00.000 Good evening and welcome to the flagship broadcast of the Aussitrew Folk Assembly.

00:03:12.300 I am Matt Flavell, the illustrious Oz Harrier.

00:03:17.380 Wait, I'm just reading the cue card there.

00:03:20.340 No, I am Alan Turnage.

00:03:23.620 I am the law speaker of the Aussitrew Folk Assembly.

00:03:27.100 I am up solo tonight because Matt can't find the on switch to his computer.

00:03:35.380 So you may just have to listen to me for two hours or 15 minutes or however long I can stand to listen to myself talk and think.

00:03:46.240 So as we all know, or maybe this is your first time in the show, we have been doing this series, Matt and I, or maybe Matt started doing this part of it.

00:03:56.560 And he just wants me to do it for a while. But this part is called adulting with Alan, mainly, I guess, because I am the most adult like chronologically, other than the the illustrious leader of our and founders, Mr. McNallan and his beautiful wife.

00:04:18.840 So, and a couple of you guys are probably up there about where I am.

00:04:22.440 I mean, I'm pushing 40.

00:04:24.200 So, I have made a lot of mistakes in a lot of areas of my life and tried to learn from those mistakes.

00:04:34.000 And so, we've been doing this series, Adulting, with Alan.

00:04:40.680 That's me.

00:04:41.100 So I have been asked, what does adulting, what does this sort of thing have to do with the religion of loss of truth?

00:04:52.100 And the answer to me is that religion is about bettering ourselves in addition to, of course, worshiping the gods and demonstrating our fealty to our ancestors and to the to the holy powers.

00:05:08.100 but also it is about making ourselves better people.

00:05:13.640 I even saw the Muppers Dicker, although at the time I was too timid to display it,

00:05:19.920 which said, Jesus loves you, but Odin wants you to grow up.

00:05:25.500 So along that line, Matt agreed to initiate this series with me

00:05:31.880 so that I could share a little bit of the life advice that I've accumulated over the many decades of my travels here through Midgard

00:05:43.840 and try to pass a little bit of that on to you and hopefully take some feedback from you, answer your questions.

00:05:54.040 And I will again remind you that I think of the show as a cumulative experience.

00:06:01.880 And the topics that we've talked about in the past, we've talked about debt management and finances and some other stuff along that line, health and medicine and working out and those sorts of things.

00:06:17.220 And so if you have questions, if you had been watching the show at some point and thought, dang it, I wish I had asked Alan this question back when he was doing this broadcast originally, feel free to type that in and email it to our illustrious host, Nick.

00:06:35.420 See, he's behind the scenes back there and running the show and making sure that everything goes as it should, Matt's technical difficulties notwithstanding.

00:06:47.220 So we're going to talk a little bit about marriage and relationships tonight.

00:06:53.220 You may ask me, Alan, how is a single person like yourself qualified to speak on this topic?

00:07:02.100 Well, good question.

00:07:03.400 I have been told that I can be sort of a difficult person to be to live with because I have high expectations of myself and high expectations of those around me.

00:07:19.200 And that has gotten in the way of my relationships.

00:07:22.760 Admittedly, I know that there are.

00:07:26.880 And so that's one of the things that I want to sort of pass along to you tonight.

00:07:32.280 Who's this guy?

00:07:33.400 Do you want to introduce yourself or do you need to finish your gum over there or what?

00:07:40.020 No, I'll introduce myself.

00:07:41.740 I apologize, guys.

00:07:43.660 My computer decided right as I was trying to initiate the camera that it desperately needed a system update right this second.

00:07:55.240 So I apologize for that.

00:07:57.880 GW Farnsworth just donated $30 to us.

00:08:00.600 I appreciate you very much.

00:08:01.800 I didn't want to say that.

00:08:02.760 start this show off with generosity well something else i want to say about generosity

00:08:11.480 we have paid off new words off this what is something i've hassled you guys about uh constantly

00:08:19.960 recently and i've been we've been plugging away at now for almost three years which you know for

00:08:27.880 the amount that New York's Hoff was is a tremendous accomplishment to get that done as quickly as we

00:08:32.760 were able to. And it was due to your guy's generosity. And it's worth mentioning it was

00:08:37.320 due to one person's generosity in particular lately that paid off the entire remaining balance

00:08:43.960 in one swoop. And how much was that? At the time he wrote the check, I wrote the check,

00:08:54.040 I'm sorry at the time he made the payment, like 38 and change, but overall he donated to a couple

00:09:01.720 of other things. He made a donation of $41,480, I believe exactly.

00:09:16.920 That is spectacular. It is the biggest. That is a strong example to follow. So all

00:09:21.960 the rest of you guys out there with $41,000. It's amazing. So remember Matthew Bean

00:09:30.040 donated that much in one instance to help us and to show his appreciation and his worship for Lord

00:09:40.680 and your other. And we are extremely appreciative of that. We're kind of blown away. It's a little

00:09:46.840 bit surreal so right that is truly awesome because many of us sat jaws agape in awe about it uh well

00:09:56.760 done thank you so much and thank you all you guys who donated over the course of this and continue

00:10:01.880 to donate um we really appreciate you guys and it enables us to to do really special things and we're

00:10:09.240 very appreciative so thank you guys so much and it's wonderful that he did that much for

00:10:15.000 us all at one shot, but the only reason that it was at $40,000 and not $140,000 where it should

00:10:21.480 have been is that we have been chipping away at it by those hundreds and thousands of dollars

00:10:27.240 that people have given. So, you know, it's, so everybody, everybody helps. That's, that's a thing.

00:10:35.080 This is kind of a overall giving philosophy that is important and has been very

00:10:41.480 instrumental in our success in recent years, we're going to have people that, you know,

00:10:49.580 do the best they can. Some people have a lot to give, some people have a little,

00:10:53.180 but everybody doing it and doing it consistently and being committed to our goals and what we're

00:11:00.360 trying to accomplish, that's what gets us there. We've reached a point with membership

00:11:06.560 to where, you know, that's why I tried to break down the incremental, hey, if every member donated

00:11:13.880 this much today, we'd pay it off. Because it puts some things in perspective. If everybody does what

00:11:20.760 they can, and everybody does a little bit, it makes a real big difference. So we appreciate that.

00:11:27.900 This program in particular, you guys have been amazing with your generosity, and it's

00:11:32.100 very, very much appreciate it. I'm sure we'll talk a little bit more about it later in the

00:11:36.940 show today. Alexander Castro, our amazing folk builder in Jacksonville, Florida, just bought

00:11:44.020 us three coffees. It's a $15 donation. Thank you for that. Yeah, you guys are awesome.

00:11:51.440 I wanted to plug a couple of other things with my normal top of the show stuff, and then we'll get

00:11:55.780 back into wherever our law speaker was taking us due to my absence so uh first and foremost if you

00:12:02.500 can make it mid-summer at odenshoff coming up soon 27th through the 29th that is at odenshoff

00:12:10.640 in brownsville california we would love to see you guys there it's shaping up to big be a big

00:12:17.100 event we have over 100 people registered right now and we're still you know almost a month out

00:12:24.100 So that's, this one's going to be a big one this year.

00:12:28.220 We're celebrating 30 years of the Ask True Folk Assembly.

00:12:31.180 We would love to have you there to celebrate with us.

00:12:33.460 If you can do it, let's make it happen.

00:12:35.460 I would love to meet you guys.

00:12:39.040 Yeah, get with your local folk builder.

00:12:40.920 We'll get you all set up.

00:12:42.980 Also, the following month, Sigur Bloat at Sigur Haim in Jackson County, Tennessee.

00:12:51.080 that's july 25th through the 27th uh law speaker you can be able to make that

00:12:59.800 yeah yes now that i know what it is okay perhaps our law speaker will join us there i will

00:13:07.160 certainly be there um very excited it's an amazing place 25th there you go i'm making a note to

00:13:14.760 myself make it make your notes now guys write it down make it happen um would love to see you guys

00:13:21.640 there uh you know while you're at it you might as well do both of those um but any of those you can

00:13:28.200 make it to again contact your local folk builder they'll get you all squared away we would love to

00:13:32.840 see you there i'd love to meet you guys and show off our really special sacred ground we have at

00:13:39.240 at both those locations. And the month following in August, we have Freyfaxi at Baldershof.

00:13:49.280 That is in Murdoch, Minnesota. That's August the 22nd through the 24th. That's going to

00:13:56.120 be a spectacular event. Some amazing people, wonderful place. I would love to meet you

00:14:01.960 guys. I'd love to see you guys there. I would love to celebrate and worship with you guys.

00:14:07.120 So if you can make any or all of those things, please do.

00:14:11.800 And with that, we can go back into where you're taking us this week.

00:14:15.640 Again, I'm sorry I showed up a little bit late today.

00:14:18.920 It's okay.

00:14:19.720 I was having fun talking to myself.

00:14:22.660 At least that way I know somebody's listening.

00:14:27.180 So, although, of course, I sort of lost my place.

00:14:32.260 But here's the way that in thinking about this topic and trying to think about it for in sort of an organized way, especially from the religious and more importantly, the traditional religionist viewpoint.

00:14:50.680 I think we're in a hard place, you know, as the AFA is starting to breach its way into relevance.

00:14:59.920 And by that, I mean, we're in this part now of what a lot of us have heard, you know, is the like the Overton window is moving in our direction.

00:15:14.220 The the traditionalist viewpoint is making a comeback.

00:15:19.980 The traditionalist lifestyle is starting to appear again on the horizon.

00:15:23.940 And so we have the AFA are, of course, in the cutting edge, in the vanguard of that movement.

00:15:34.140 So which brings me again back to sort of where I was thinking about it, like, why?

00:15:41.820 How is this a religious thing?

00:15:45.280 And why is it important in the AFA to talk about and think about actively marriage and relationships?

00:15:53.940 First, you know, I think it should be noted just as, you know, maybe as an aside, but all the big organized Christian faiths have marriage counseling programs.

00:16:07.800 In fact, one of the office buildings that I go to regularly in my employment, self-employment, that, you know, I go through this big Christian wedding counseling thing where they have these big, nice offices and six or eight paid staff, and they're trying to educate their people in the, you know, in the way of doing their, you know, making their relationships better.

00:16:37.300 And I think that's one of the things that that because to use founder McAllen's phrase, which I promoted for years and I think is an important way to think about it, we are reaching critical density.

00:16:53.460 We're reaching this point where we have enough local presence. We have enough online presence where we have support groups for people that, you know, we have Gothar and we have Gothis and Githias who can counsel people who are struggling with these sorts of issues.

00:17:21.240 And so that is our job. That is our job to counsel people who are struggling with their own relationships or, you know, with the lack of relationship or the, you know, just trying to navigate their way through the modern world in, you know, in relationship to their gods and their ancestors.

00:17:45.960 um now and then so where then do we find ourselves in this point in history um as we say in

00:18:01.820 different contexts and it's sad but true um you know it is the Kali Yuga um this is a

00:18:10.840 It's a time of dissolution. It's a time of chaos. It's a wolf age when it, you know, when there, when there is lots and lots of disorder and chaos going on.

00:18:29.300 However, as the Baron pointed out, in the Kali Yuga, it is also easier to find enlightenment. It is easier to find self-initiation in this time of chaos because while disorder prevails, it is also a time when knowledge is less hidden.

00:18:53.000 Things have been revealed that have been concealed for quite some time.

00:18:57.340 And that is, I think, is why dharmic faiths are like ours, are making their way back to the forefront because while lines of transmission are scattered, but but they're also more they've they've opened.

00:19:17.840 And and so and whether that's just an adjunct of the age that we're in or whether it's deliberate by those who have been keeping this flame for so long.

00:19:28.920 I think it's important to understand that these ideas and ideals that we in the AFA promote, that that these are the right way of living.

00:19:44.100 And you can say that's judgmental or not. That's what we do.

00:19:47.340 I mean, I think that's one of the shortcomings of one of the other dharmic faiths is that, you know, to try to be nonjudgmental, I think is just wrongheaded. 0.81

00:19:59.500 There is there is right way. There is a wrong way to do some things. 0.99

00:20:03.460 There's some ground in the middle there. You know, there are lots of right ways to do it.

00:20:06.560 There are lots of wrong ways to do it, but there are certainly, you can certainly, at some point, you can, along this spectrum, you can hit a spot where there's wrong stuff over here.

00:20:20.020 There's right stuff over here. And part of the job of the AFA and we go there is to try to help all of help each other as priests and help everyone as members.

00:20:37.500 Try to negotiate our way along that line so that we live better lives that are more faithful to our own traditions and to our own fealty, to our gods and to our ancestors.

00:20:56.360 So what am I talking about?

00:21:00.940 One of the things that I've been reading a good bit about lately is I've just finished Alain Benoit's book Against Liberalism.

00:21:15.980 And one of the things that he points out, and it helped me frame what it is that we in the AFA are doing, it helped me understand it at a little bit more complex level, maybe.

00:21:31.840 But liberalism, modern liberalism, is not just progressivism. Progressivism is one aspect of liberalism, but the primary distinction between liberalism and traditionalism is that tradition is about us.

00:21:52.920 Tradition is about we. Tradition is all of us. Tradition is tribal. Tradition is about what is good for we.

00:22:02.920 And liberalism is about what's good for me. What is the best decision that I can make? How can I actualize myself? And ignores the costs to other peoples, to friends, family, tribe, nation, and ethnic.

00:22:29.040 And that's the sort of thing where you can start to draw these lines of judgment in between what's good for you as an individual may not be the best thing for your family, may not be the best thing for your people.

00:22:48.600 And, you know, it's it's corny sort of how it's come back around to be this thing.

00:22:56.000 But, you know, you do want to be a credit to yourself. 0.52

00:23:00.380 You want to be a credit to your race.

00:23:03.620 You want to be a credit to your ancestors.

00:23:06.180 You want to be able to stand proudly and.

00:23:12.080 Could you say look them in the eye?

00:23:13.860 We're not positive that when you cross the veil that it's going to work exactly that way.

00:23:17.820 But when you meet your ancestors on the other side of Midgard's plane, you want to be able to say, you know, I was a noble and rightful and upstanding representative of your lineage.

00:23:39.040 and carry your name through my life in a way in which I can be proud to pass on to my children.

00:23:50.720 No, I haven't said very much yet about tonight's topic,

00:23:54.900 but I'm just sort of laying the groundwork for the way that,

00:23:58.320 Because, you know, there are books and libraries and millions and millions of dollars being made in family counseling and all that sort of thing.

00:24:12.560 And but but so I'm certainly don't not trying to take that place.

00:24:20.100 I'm just trying to give us all some framework from which we can start to think about the ways that we can be better to each other and be better for each other.

00:24:37.120 I've got some stuff that I've thought of in particular based on my experience, some of which, of course, I've managed to stick my thumb in my own eye.

00:24:45.880 And by making mistakes that I have lived to regret, I can tell you that prevention is better than apology, although one works well for the other two.

00:25:06.900 And what I mean by that, certainly to get like to in my own particular way of what the particularized examples, one of the couple of things that I wanted to talk about in particular, one of the things is to fight fair.

00:25:25.620 You know, we disagree about things. And when I say we, I mean you and your significant other, you and your wife, you and your girlfriend are going to disagree about stuff. Some of it can be petty, but it can blow up into something big at the time if you let it.

00:25:48.180 One of the things then that you have to do, it seems to me, is number one, is to maintain some perspective, right? How torqued, how upsetting is it because your girlfriend keeps closing the door of the seatbelt in your car, you know, or she mispronounces these couple of words that get under your skin a little bit.

00:26:16.100 But those are the kinds of things that if you let it grate at you, you know, it's like sand in your shoe, right?

00:26:23.840 It can erode and chafe, but you have to think about, like, in the great grand scheme of things, this is the woman I love.

00:26:38.940 This is the man that I love.

00:26:40.320 It's okay if he stumbles around a little bit and makes some mistakes because I make mistakes, too.

00:26:47.200 So you do something bad, I do something bad.

00:26:50.520 But, you know, in the great grand scheme of things, we live a life of joy.

00:26:55.040 We live a life of happiness and gratitude.

00:26:57.080 And if we can do that as the framework for our relationship, then we can get past these small, petty disagreements that otherwise can present big stumbling blocks.

00:27:16.820 I think it's important when people have disagreement to, number one, to fight fair, and I am, used to be, pretty bad at, you know, having the scathing comeback rather than addressing the disagreement, okay?

00:27:40.920 If we're talking about what color to paint this wall, okay, or, you know, you spilled, you know, you spilled the mustard on my nice dress, okay, well, remember that time that you did that and it made me mad?

00:27:56.400 You know, it's not about that. Fight fair. Love each other. And remember that the goal of this is for us, for the center to hold, or to keep ourselves together in a way that allows us to promulgate our faith and to be examples to the folk without that

00:28:26.400 Our faith and our practitioners of our faith can be a positive influence in the direction of the world.

00:28:36.800 Feel free to break in edgewise.

00:28:38.880 I know I'm short.

00:28:40.940 No, no, no.

00:28:41.620 It's good.

00:28:43.620 Well, while we're on the point of inevitable arguments and fights over stuff.

00:28:54.640 I think it's very important to possess or at the very least to develop and work towards possessing emotional control over what you're doing and enough step back perspective to examine what your goal is in the argument.

00:29:25.640 We are very used to, in different circumstances in our life, trying to win a confrontation for the sake of defeating a foe.

00:29:38.160 One of the things, this is kind of meta, but it does go into play here.

00:29:43.200 One of the reasons that strife amongst kinsmen was such a problem to our ancestors is there's no winning when you're fighting people on your team.

00:29:51.040 like the victory's hollow because yay if you win you've just you know slain your brother

00:29:58.960 or stolen your cousin's stuff your family is still less for it and that's one of the things

00:30:06.300 in relationships most of the time there's absolutely important enough things that you

00:30:11.640 need to put your foot down on or that are fundamental that you need to get corrected

00:30:22.360 but the point of the argument isn't defeating your opponent your opponent is someone who

00:30:27.560 ought to be on your team it's not about winning it's about communicating the thing that you

00:30:34.200 need to get addressed or want to express to the one that you love not about defeating them with

00:30:40.920 clever stratagems or attacks or you know you mentioned well you mentioned having the quick

00:30:48.120 comeback that's awesome in life if you're able to like be really good at arguing and you're able to

00:30:55.480 debate well and you have that chambered but it's really important not to take cheap shots that you

00:31:03.800 don't need to with someone you love it's very often that people get wrapped up in the emotion

00:31:11.720 of things and they take those shots when they shouldn't being able to have enough peace of

00:31:17.640 mind that you can step away from an argument at least in your head for a second reevaluate

00:31:24.520 what you're trying to accomplish and adjust your tone and your tactics towards the thing

00:31:30.840 you're trying to accomplish and i don't mean this as nebulous as this like everybody every couple 0.78

00:31:36.600 fights about stuff sometimes you fight over stupid little things sometimes it's a bigger thing and

00:31:41.880 sometimes like alan mentioned earlier well i think he alluded to this earlier um little things if let 0.80

00:31:51.320 built up and not expressed and you dwell on can often end up stuff becomes a proxy war for bigger

00:32:00.280 issues you fight over some misplaced dish in the kitchen and it has nothing to do with that it has

00:32:06.680 something to do with a lingering pattern of feeling disregarded or whatever else but it comes out over

00:32:15.720 the stupidest little thing i think it's extremely important and i'm going to answer trent's question

00:32:22.600 now because i think it fits says what are your thoughts on the advice never to go to bed angry 0.97

00:32:29.240 at each other. That's something I've heard time and again from couples that have been successful

00:32:35.220 over the long run. And it's something I believe really strongly. Get, and I'm sure that we all

00:32:44.340 have our ways of processing things, but I can't speak strongly enough about the benefit of

00:32:51.560 getting past stuff put it out there have the conversation don't put it off and dwell on it

00:33:00.740 and be passive aggressively angry at your partner that's ridiculous but it's all too

00:33:08.720 common for a variety of reasons and what's that difficult word that weird that you're trying to

00:33:14.900 get to that it took me listening to you to be able to think about it communicate communicate

00:33:21.320 I don't like it when you hide my plate in the other drawer where, you know, I want it in this drawer.

00:33:30.080 You know, that's and then you get you have the discussion and everybody gets through it.

00:33:38.400 Or when your wife puts a piece of Tupperware that doesn't fit where you think it should be, you hide it someplace that she can't reach and then it doesn't reoffend.

00:33:47.940 that's a good strategy i'm gonna i may or may not have employed that spread

00:33:54.140 seriously communication is really really important all these things are

00:34:02.200 they sound so i don't know

00:34:06.960 hippie and like

00:34:12.080 they sound silly sometimes because they're small and they're obviously common sense but they're

00:34:20.220 things that um certainly i'm speaking a lot of this from experience of things i've learned

00:34:26.860 through success and through many failures in my life and i believe it's stuff that that alan

00:34:33.980 probably comes to this these conclusions and this knowledge honestly through school hard knocks on

00:34:39.820 too um it's important to communicate stuff and it's important to not only send out communication

00:34:51.020 but receive and internalize communication from from your spouse as well that's

00:34:56.540 that's very important often when we argue or we're in the midst of something we're so quick

00:35:04.780 to think of the next thing we're going to say or the argument we're going to make to refute them

00:35:12.140 that we don't stop to appreciate the thing that they're saying and the way that something is

00:35:19.880 affecting them or making them feel. Again, the argument is about communication and getting each

00:35:28.300 other's needs met, not about winning and destroying your opponent. Not if you plan on maintaining your

00:35:36.360 relationship with your opponent. If you're all the way done, then cool, go for it. But if your goal

00:35:41.780 on the other side of it is have a stronger marriage or a stronger relationship, that goal has to be

00:35:47.840 in mind on how you conduct your, you know, your squabbling in between there.

00:35:53.860 Absolutely. And the, and it's difficult, you know, the, a lot of these topics are hard to

00:36:05.600 discuss. It's stuff that we have been raised to avoid, you know, talking about money. You know,

00:36:14.140 One of the things that I do before I do a marriage is I talk to the couple about, you know, these things you're going to, you know, you have to have a common viewpoint about money.

00:36:30.720 You have to have a common way of dealing, you know, of at least approaching the problem, right?

00:36:38.940 Because the old saying that opposites attract is wildly untrue.

00:36:46.040 You know, the thing that makes a strong, lasting relationship is people who have a common, centric idea about, you know, how to raise the kids.

00:37:00.860 How to, you know, do we spend money?

00:37:03.000 Do we save money?

00:37:04.600 Do we buy the latest thing or do we wait?

00:37:08.160 Those are the kinds of things that if you don't think that out ahead of time and if you and especially once once you are married, if you don't talk about it, you know, in a rational, loving, understanding way.

00:37:25.940 Those are the kinds of things that can build that simmering resentment, you know, when you're still paying off the credit card from that $600 handbag that she bought.

00:37:38.320 And then you go out and buy a $800 pistol because, you know, your other pistol was lost in a tragic boating accident.

00:37:46.400 So you need to replace it.

00:37:47.760 So those are the kinds of things that, you know, and then instead of maintaining that common goal of, you know, let's save up so we can buy a house or let's save up, pay off a house or let's spend less money so we can give more to the AFA, you know, you end up where you're spending so much money on credit card interest that you forgot my first lecture back there where I told you not to do that.

00:38:14.180 So those are certainly the kinds of things that the more you talk about it, the more open that you are.

00:38:24.720 And that's where some of the rest of the kind of big picture stuff starts to come in.

00:38:35.360 And, you know, I think one of the things that the progressives have done, I think, for the better, is to get us back in the habit of talking about these sorts of things.

00:38:56.380 I don't really know that much about my own parents' relationship, but I certainly know a lot about the relationship of a lot of other adults of their era, and they didn't talk about money or they didn't talk about those sorts of things.

00:39:14.020 You know, they would just sort of, they would do and didn't have the most, for the most part, didn't have the kind of wealth that we have to negotiate our way through right now.

00:39:27.340 But, you know, it was just a year of where, you know, it was just those sorts of things were not talked about.

00:39:35.500 I think, though, it is important now that we are getting to this era, and I am not a real big fan of talk therapy and that sort of thing, but I do think that it's important to avoid having to go to therapy by having your wife, your husband, as your sounding board, as your best friend.

00:40:03.340 And that brings up one of the things I'm going to talk about.

00:40:07.780 So one of the I think one of the things that makes this Kali Yuga era, and I'll try to stop saying that one of the things that makes the modern era difficult to navigate our way through. 0.68

00:40:21.600 is that we've been raised on the culture of easy solutions,

00:40:28.720 not just pop psychology, but, you know, movies and especially sitcoms

00:40:36.540 and those sorts of things have taught us that, you know,

00:40:39.380 you can have a great big, you know, gut-wrenching,

00:40:45.160 nearly life-ending fight and then patch it all up

00:40:50.760 in an hour and a half and have time to, you know, do a bunch of other stuff too.

00:40:58.460 Reality is not that way. Reality is messy. There's this long, there's always a long tail

00:41:06.420 to these sorts of things, which is why it's important not to go to bed angry because those

00:41:12.680 The sorts of long-term lingering resentments are the sorts of things that make you fight unfairly when it comes back to your turn.

00:41:29.660 You know, when you feel aggrieved rather than trying to rationalize to a solution like Matt, like you were talking about, you know, all you want to do is lash out because you're trying to, you know, get some get back for the time that you got your feelings hurt, you know, and that's, I can tell you that's not a good way to run a household.

00:41:52.560 So some of these things, and I'm, it's hard because the second we get on discussions of relationships and marriage and stuff, it immediately, we default, our greatest wisdom on that isn't drawing nuggets from the Lord.

00:42:11.860 It's us talking about very personal, often very painful life experience and the lessons that we've learned because of it.

00:42:23.180 And so, you know, I just sharing some of that's going to come from from our own experience on this.

00:42:29.660 But I noticed in the comments section, Rachel mentions, you know, well, what if you what if you're angry because you're tired and you need to go to bed to have some perspective?

00:42:39.980 and in the morning, you know, maybe it won't be a big deal. And don't mistake what I'm saying. I

00:42:47.320 don't think necessarily everything needs to be resolved a hundred percent, but in the midst of a,

00:42:58.200 I tell you what, one of the most miserable things that I can comprehend

00:43:04.240 end is existing knowing that the person I deeply love and care

00:43:12.940 about is angry at me. I hate that. It is cruel in a way to

00:43:24.340 allow that feeling to linger with your partner, especially if

00:43:28.340 there's somebody that processes things that way. If your goals in your relationship, and this may

00:43:37.480 be really different if you're just dating somebody or whatever, but we're talking about serious

00:43:41.120 relationships tonight and marriages. There comes a point where your values need to be, you know,

00:43:49.940 when you're assessing stuff, you have a responsibility towards your partner's best

00:43:56.620 interest and I think all too often especially when things are very personal and we're hurt

00:44:03.260 to think about ourselves and not think about our partner's interest there's something

00:44:09.360 coming together make peace telling each other you love each other giving each other a hug

00:44:15.060 and coming to a a more comfortable state to go to bed on is very valuable it doesn't mean

00:44:25.140 everything necessarily needs to be 100% resolved, but coming back to a place where there's not open

00:44:31.220 hostility is always an advisable thing. People tend to stew on stuff, and one of the things, and

00:44:41.060 guys probably do this too, but I know that women often do this, and I've often

00:44:46.940 been the subject of this poorly, and ladies listening to this, please realize this is two

00:44:53.200 guys that have been through stuff. We're going to have some women-specific trauma on here that you

00:44:59.040 guys probably have experienced in a different way and different things. But I have been unfairly

00:45:06.460 judged for imaginary conversations that my imaginary stand-in has had because arguments

00:45:13.800 went on in somebody's head. And it's funny because when you have imaginary arguments,

00:45:21.480 but with a real person, but in your head. If you have enough of them, and you spend enough

00:45:28.480 time dwelling on them, your brain doesn't categorize them as imaginary. They have the

00:45:35.060 same response and the same memory as if they were real. And you carry over that resentment from

00:45:40.920 things that, you know, you wish you would have said into the real world. And it sounds really

00:45:47.940 silly, but I think, you know, a lot of us have probably experienced that in our life.

00:45:54.600 And you have to be able to watch out for that on both sides of that. You know, 0.91

00:46:00.320 I have certainly

00:46:03.640 misinterpreted the way that things were said, because I take it out into this very different

00:46:15.920 arc in in what was intended so you know so if if at the time and i and i'm not saying i do it all

00:46:25.760 the time now i mean it's it's easy to think about it in the abstract and say well you should

00:46:30.160 communicate and you know take a breath and take a step back but you know when your adrenaline's up

00:46:36.000 and it's stuff's going on it's not always easy to keep perspective but you know i do sometimes

00:46:46.160 manage to say what do you mean by that you know i clarify what you how you mean that term that

00:46:51.840 could mean one of 17 things up along the spectrum so did you mean a or did you mean r and then oh

00:47:00.800 okay. If that's how you meant it, then okay. Then that's not bad. I can accept that criticism.

00:47:08.720 Speaking of which, I think another important thing that I may not have been

00:47:18.960 all that good about my previous lifestyle is to say that you're wrong. Just admit that sometimes

00:47:30.800 rarely you can be wrong in the way that you do stuff and what you said or how

00:47:37.500 you approach something or whether it's facts or attitudes or just in general

00:47:47.480 you know and when you're wrong just say it you're not you know it's like you

00:47:51.900 know it's like you said you know that's you're not you're not that doesn't move

00:47:56.720 you down the totem pole because you made a mistake I mean this is not some kind

00:48:00.680 of scoring system where making a mistake is going to clip a corner off your man card.

00:48:08.640 It's going to make your relationship better.

00:48:12.960 So the rest of the stuff doesn't matter.

00:48:15.000 You know, you know, you can puff your chest out to your buddies and then when you come

00:48:20.020 home, okay, you know, I shouldn't have done that, I shouldn't have said that, I was wrong,

00:48:23.580 you were right.

00:48:26.020 That's, you know, that's, that I think is an important thing.

00:48:29.400 And to take blame, to take blame for the mistakes that you make and to atone for those, because, you know, that's the, you know, that's one of the things that we recognize.

00:48:45.040 as i think steve's book does a great job of illustrating that is that our relationships

00:48:52.160 in this sort of way this is what i was and this relates back to what i was talking about about the

00:48:56.560 tribalism aspect and the um and the relationship that you know we it's this it's the horizontal

00:49:05.120 plane right our relationships the duties the duties that we owe each other

00:49:11.760 of fealty and loyalty and good faith and all those sorts of things,

00:49:23.560 it's important to maintain, and the way that you do that is by accepting your part of the blame.

00:49:30.520 When you make a mistake, hey, screwed up, shouldn't have done that.

00:49:35.620 You'd be surprised how much that can take the wind out of an argument.

00:49:41.760 A thousand percent. A lot of, as a people, we are very ill-raised and ill-equipped to do this right. We have consumed a lot of very poor examples and very poor signaling in our lifetimes.

00:50:06.360 And one of that, or one aspect of that, one way that displays itself, it is, we are very reluctant to admit fault and to take responsibility.

00:50:25.400 and oftentimes especially in a healthy relationship where it's not always about

00:50:34.080 winning and it's not about any of the toxicity that we talked about but when it is about feeling

00:50:39.160 heard and feeling respected or appreciated

00:50:42.920 what alan was saying a second ago is really rings true somebody being able to be like okay

00:50:51.260 stop thinking about it you know what you're absolutely right i'm very sorry i did that

00:50:59.580 i will try not to do that in the future that fixes a lot of stuff those things are

00:51:05.580 very hard for some people to say they make a world of difference if they're done sincerely

00:51:12.140 That can really fix a lot of things. So many times, relationship arguments are about feeling heard, getting it off your chest, and feeling like your thoughts and feelings matter to the other person.

00:51:32.300 And taking the time to acknowledge that and make that really known does a lot to help get through rough spots or, you know, placate bruised feelings.

00:51:48.120 And I think it's important, and I hadn't even thought about it that way, but I think it's important what you said, you know, I won't do that again.

00:51:56.560 You know, that's the, you know, I made a mistake, a mistake that will not reoccur. That's, you know, because a lot of times that's why we people, I think that's why people are so defensive about stuff is not just that one time of, you know, when we got our feelings hurt, but the fear that it could happen again.

00:52:24.240 And I think the, you know, and, you know, assurance that, you know, that it's not going to happen again is, you know, goes a long way toward, you know, mending that rift.

00:52:35.900 so something else and that i'll chatter about for a second because this is and it this may not be

00:52:48.140 something that is you know that rings true for most people but one of the you know one of the

00:52:53.920 things that we actually i read about this it was peripheral to some of the stuff that

00:53:02.640 Jordan Peterson was talking about at one point. But it's, it's the idea that in the modern world,

00:53:14.280 in the liberal world that we have created is very atomized. And we're, and for most

00:53:22.200 people. We have been pulled away from lots and lots of our support systems. I mean,

00:53:31.780 we grew up, I don't mean we individuals, but like we evolved, we, over the hundreds of thousands of

00:53:45.880 years, knowing intimately, maybe a couple of hundred people, but knowing them very well

00:53:53.960 and knowing and being in, in totally enmeshed in this society where people knew each other.

00:54:02.120 And so if you got out of line, the rest of the town bring you back in. Um, if you were

00:54:12.840 offended or like if you were having problems with your spouse, you could go to your cousin

00:54:20.080 or your best friend or your family who was all within easy reach of where you were, number

00:54:29.900 one. And then number two, and I try not to over romanticize the past. It was harsh and

00:54:40.700 unyielding in many ways but it's also i think important to recognize that um that we were

00:54:48.620 embedded in a support system that allowed us to have better understanding and and better

00:54:58.060 proportionality to these sorts of things both because there was that when something went wrong

00:55:04.060 There were dozens of people there to try to help you make it better, but also because your spouse, your partner was not the all in everything that it has come to be for a lot of people.

00:55:28.100 You know, if you move, especially two or three times, like for me, when I went to college, you know, I left my hometown, I went to college, I left college, I went to a different place to work, I left that place to go to law school, I left that place to go to, so in all these travels, my supply lines got thinner and thinner.

00:55:55.540 And, you know, my cohort group shrank to this point where, you know, where a lot of, and I think it's true for a lot of people, the modern condition is that your spouse ends up being your entire support network.

00:56:15.680 And that's very it's very fragile in that way. And that's one of the things that that's yet another reason why I'm so supportive of the Austrian Folk Assembly is that we are building this network of friends and confidants and priests and counselors and all that stuff.

00:56:38.040 So, when things do go astray, we can count on each other to offer perspective and guidance and comfort and all the things that are necessary to try to navigate the brutal reality of the Kali Yuga.

00:57:01.140 I said that again. I said I wasn't going to. 0.61

00:57:05.520 Matt?

00:57:06.120 Well, I'd like to throw in, following right along those lines, there was a time to where you had parents and perhaps grandparents and an extended group of people in your social circle, in your local community, your church leaders, various other things to where they could help smooth those things over,

00:57:33.680 help give you perspective. You could run things by your elders, and they could talk to you about

00:57:41.280 things that they've learned and wisdom that they have in their years.

00:57:46.680 And in the world outside of the AFA, that's very hard to come by in a lot of our lives.

00:57:54.680 Within the AFA, that's not the case. I've watched so many people be benefited,

00:58:02.160 those who want to actively be a part of our AFA family by having people to talk to.

00:58:10.920 Our go-thar counsel people about their relationship issues, their marriage.

00:58:19.980 Someone somewhere, at least weekly, but very often.

00:58:25.940 And that's a really important tool to be able to go to somebody and get some wisdom on that.

00:58:31.000 I talk with the Gothar often about, you know, every year that goes by, our Gothar have a deeper well of experience to draw from.

00:58:46.200 We're able to talk to each other and share the collected wisdom and life experience of every other AFA Gothi or Githia that's ever been.

00:58:56.200 and to take that and to apply it to helping our folk in the best way possible that is a tremendous

00:59:03.800 resource that we have for our folk and i've watched it be extremely helpful one of the

00:59:10.060 things that's helpful on that and just putting it out there our gothar are very happy to

00:59:14.720 help you and your partner through problems in your marriage or whatever else and we have enough

00:59:21.420 Gothar now that, you know, you guys can do it through one Gothi or one Githya, or there's the

00:59:31.540 option of each party having their own Gothi or Githya they're talking to that can help advocate

00:59:38.220 for them and help them sort their stuff out. There's a lot of good options, and I would

00:59:44.040 encourage everybody if they find this, and it doesn't have to be when you're at the point of

00:59:47.680 crisis, if you just need some advice in your relationship, we would all love to help you to

00:59:53.640 the very best of our ability. We're all committed to seeing AFA families succeed. And so working

01:00:02.200 towards that and helping you all work towards that in your own life is something that we're

01:00:07.040 all aboard trying to help with. Big time.

01:00:17.680 So what do you have on the agenda from here?

01:00:25.320 I have a few other sorts of specific things.

01:00:30.140 I don't know how much we want to get into dealing with specifics.

01:00:35.400 I think a lot of it has to do with, you know, the culture that we're trying to navigate.

01:00:47.680 I, you know, we sometimes use the word conservative. I really prefer the word traditional now where we have a very traditional viewpoint on sex roles on on approaches to life in general.

01:01:11.340 Um, and so approaches to, um, approaches to relationships, and I know it's difficult for the younger guys, um, to try to get their way through that because young men, young white men are tending to be much more conservative now, traditional.

01:01:38.460 and young white women are veering off into a much more progressive mindset for the most part.

01:01:49.560 And these are, of course, generalizations, but those are what those are what the polling numbers show that.

01:01:58.340 And I, you know, I have a lot of empathy for guys who are finding it difficult to approach women, you know, and actually in part of the prep for today's show, one of the things I read, you know, one of the articles I've read about was that men have been cowed by this idea that even looking at a woman,

01:02:28.200 is, you know, some kind of sexual assault. So they try to stay so far back from giving any kind

01:02:37.660 of offense that they don't even manage to even talk to women. And it's difficult. I mean, you

01:02:45.400 You know, women have been trained by the blue haired mob to be hypersensitive to like a like a guy talking to you or whatever. 0.93

01:03:01.200 You know, it's and it's absurd how triggered they can be by just a simple conversation. 0.96

01:03:13.580 And I have, again, I have a lot of sympathy for our guys out there trying to chat up a girl, right?

01:03:21.520 Because we, back in the old days, and it's, I guess it's sort of easier for me because girls don't see me as a threat.

01:03:29.960 So I can comment on stuff and then I'm just, you know, for me, it's just a brush.

01:03:35.200 But it's, you know, and maybe part of it is that our guys need to have maybe be a little less aggressive.

01:03:55.160 And it's not, and I know that's sort of contradictory, right?

01:03:57.700 But you have to be able to talk to women, but you have to do it in a way where you're not being hyper aggressive toward any kind of sexual content, toward any kind of even relationship content to begin with.

01:04:16.860 You know, you can have a conversation with a girl and maybe it goes somewhere, maybe it doesn't.

01:04:21.860 I think, so I think that it's been harmed on both sides of that equation by too many of our men absorbing the wrong lessons from like the pickup culture. 0.86

01:04:41.260 I think that's a terrible approach to living a life. 0.89

01:04:49.400 It's a terrible approach to the way that you would try to manage relationships with women because to the extent that anybody wants to hear it, 1.00

01:05:04.720 the you know that sort of life is empty it's devoid of content it is vapid and shallow 1.00

01:05:18.080 and what we should be go what we should be striving for as men is to have deep meaningful

01:05:26.320 relationships with beautiful intelligent women and um so that's what i have and it's good

01:05:37.600 um and i consider myself lucky in that vein um feel free to agree with that matt the um

01:05:47.760 yeah and it's um but so one of the things and i'm and this may be a little

01:05:53.840 tricky topic to talk about

01:05:57.600 in our show, but 1.00

01:06:00.900 I think pornography is terrible. 0.83

01:06:05.160 It's a horrible 0.94

01:06:06.560 mass

01:06:12.080 delusion that has been foisted on 0.93

01:06:17.300 our civilization by those who will not

01:06:21.380 be named and it's uh and it gives men young men especially terrible horrible wrong ideas about

01:06:35.000 women and again about the you know we're all sexual beings but that's not the most important

01:06:46.920 thing in a relationship and if you and and but but but having that wrong nature of about what

01:06:53.080 relationships are for and what it is that you're looking for when you talk to a girl at the

01:07:01.580 bookstore um you know it can if your mind is always in that one direction it makes it really

01:07:12.400 difficult to build anything that is historically and by historically i mean i don't mean like it's

01:07:22.320 going to be epic you know um you know a romance that will be remembered from decades and centuries

01:07:32.560 to come well the historiography of relationship building is about the small things it's about the

01:07:40.800 inside jokes that only you get it's about building a history of you know that time you

01:07:48.480 went to the italian restaurant and the waiter spilled the water on your dress i mean those

01:07:55.040 are the kinds of things that allow you to have a history with a person that will withstand the

01:08:05.760 trials of whatever it is that you're arguing about the next time because you know it's it's

01:08:14.880 the slow build it's laying foundation on those those kinds of things that allow you to

01:08:26.320 make a strong and lasting relationship

01:08:28.400 Sex is good, don't get me wrong, but it's not the, but the, you know, but there's more to it. I remember, who's the guy? Is it Eddie Van Halen? You know, you got to do something for the other 16 hours of the day.

01:08:52.640 well so i'd like to i think this is in keeping with it first uh paul in south carolina donated

01:09:03.440 75 to thor's hoff thank you paul we appreciate it very much um there is a

01:09:10.400 and i want to speak to the problem and then then talk about solutions on it i don't want to just

01:09:17.840 endlessly dwell on on the negativity of it. But there's a lot of really competing factors.

01:09:31.680 We don't have the same traditional structures that we had that helped the more socially reserved

01:09:39.280 to build relationships um we're atomized we're very isolated in a lot of ways we're in closer

01:09:49.520 proximity than we've ever been before but the average person feels more isolation than they've

01:09:55.280 ever felt we through you know alan mentioned pornography but also think through um you know

01:10:05.280 online hookup apps and whatever else. I think there is an idea by guys, at least, that they're

01:10:15.500 going to all of a sudden be able to get all this opportunity to get laid by all these chicks all

01:10:20.580 the time. That's not what the statistics show. The statistics show is that, no, the same super 1.00

01:10:27.460 high value guys that the chicks go after normally, now they're just getting all the chicks and

01:10:32.500 there's still nothing to go around for these guys. So we've got a generation of young men

01:10:36.660 that get told by the media and by all of the messaging that everything about masculinity

01:10:44.000 and about them is bad, but they get counter-signaled because reality doesn't change and hormones

01:10:51.200 don't change. These women want these masculine dudes, but society has trained our men to not 0.54

01:11:01.080 display that properly. So they're either super soft and super weak, or they have some kind of 0.99

01:11:09.800 strange metastasized idea of masculinity that gets displayed in a really negative way,

01:11:16.920 because there's not a healthy outlet for it. And that's a challenge. I know that young men,

01:11:24.820 some, a lot of the issues with sex have to do with confidence. A lot of young men

01:11:30.540 women don't feel confident because they feel like they cannot be successful with women

01:11:38.300 and they don't get that attention or that affirmation. They're like, man, how do I get 0.98

01:11:44.240 chicks? Oh, well, you got to be confident. Well, how are you confident by relying on your successes 0.95

01:11:50.160 you've had in the past with women? And it's this cycle that unless something steps in to break it, 0.98

01:11:56.100 or unless you're innovative and you're able to find your niche

01:12:00.140 to where you can break that circuit,

01:12:03.080 what I find a lot is young men being very desperate.

01:12:07.980 So they end up either with a very poor attitude about women,

01:12:13.260 with a very unrealistic expectation of what they get resentful

01:12:20.360 and feel entitled to,

01:12:22.280 or they settle for someone that they are very quickly feel resentful that they settled for

01:12:33.640 and I would encourage a number of things as the Ausitru Folk Assembly we have

01:12:46.020 access to a community of people that we can help

01:12:52.280 So we need.

01:12:57.600 So one thing, when people traditionally found themselves, you know, there's two single people in a church and they don't know how to talk to each other.

01:13:07.940 And they're, you know, getting a little long in the tooth to be single.

01:13:13.000 The old ladies in the church kind of, you know, figure it out and push them together and arrange for them to have a conversation. 1.00

01:13:20.900 And that was a very effective tool. You'd have brothers, sisters, older siblings that were able to help, you know, set you up with their friend or whatever.

01:13:35.580 Or maybe they'd break the ice for you and be your wingman on stuff and help, you know, break the social barrier that you that you're facing.

01:13:45.300 Awkwardness that we all feel in that posture. 1.00

01:13:48.440 yeah we have and and i i don't know how it is for ladies but i know for men

01:13:55.960 that can be crippling and you find yourself with an increased desperation the more time that passes

01:14:03.720 that you're not building success with women the more resentful and the more metastasized

01:14:12.200 your own needs and desires become and the more the further you feel out of reach being successful is

01:14:22.440 and that's really unfortunate and i've seen i see that in our circles all the time

01:14:28.440 i think and there's no and there's no easy answer no you know to that sort of thing and you know

01:14:34.600 And it's certainly right to say that women and men, too, are attracted to confidence, although confidence, as you say, confidence is about your own accomplishments.

01:14:53.420 It's not about acting confident. And that sort of hubris and arrogance is the sort of thing that that is easily detected, you know, so you can be confident because you're a, you know, because you're a good provider, because you're a good carpenter, you know, there, you know, because you have life skills.

01:15:17.360 Those are the sorts of things that, despite the shallow culture of the Internet, and that's, you know, that's one of the reasons why I harp on everybody being on their phone all the time, is the more of this crap culture that you brush against, the more it reduces your own personhood.

01:15:45.320 And, you know, a good guy and a good woman can still make it in this era.

01:15:55.600 It's, you know, it's just hard to get that first introduction a lot of times.

01:16:03.240 So something I'd like to say, too, that I think is of vital importance and is probably going to hurt some people's feelings.

01:16:10.260 But truth is one of our virtues.

01:16:15.320 We all find ourselves at different points.

01:16:17.980 If you are single, from day one, at the beginning of a potential relationship, make very clear the core things that you need out of a relationship moving forward, and don't assume you can work on them over time.

01:16:44.020 And I say that things like fundamental worldview, things like religion, things like future goals, you are setting yourself up for failure if people, hi, I'm a Christian, I'm, you know, a super leftist, and I don't want kids.

01:17:07.360 well, that's okay. I can work on her. And over time, it's not impossible, but it is very likely

01:17:16.360 to cause you a lot of heartache and a lot of internal battles with yourself

01:17:24.200 and thus battles with the one that you care about over time. Don't do that if you can avoid it.

01:17:32.100 it I have been that desperate young man that found himself in whatever I could get because

01:17:42.660 low self-esteem not a track record of a lot of success I've been there and I felt that and it's

01:17:48.720 miserable and so you make compromises and then you find yourself unhappy in your life

01:17:55.120 don't do that um i've in my life i've been in relationships with people who shared my values

01:18:05.780 and relationships with people who didn't share my values at all and i can tell you finding a woman

01:18:12.620 who shares my worldview who is also true who is committed to supporting the lifestyle and the life

01:18:24.320 that I want to have for myself and my family.

01:18:32.360 Until you have that, you may not realize the difference it makes,

01:18:36.200 but it makes a massive difference.

01:18:39.320 Establishing ups.

01:18:40.420 And so your list of required things can't be as long as your arm.

01:18:45.940 You need a couple of core value things. 1.00

01:18:49.300 And you also need to not be so women are not your A.I. girlfriend that you're creating on your computer. 1.00

01:19:03.940 Right. They're living, breathing people.

01:19:09.240 And if you do not find yourself currently in the company of amazingly beautiful women that have all of the things going for them that you wish they had. 0.98

01:19:20.100 maybe your market share is not such that you can demand the most perfect specimen

01:19:26.980 of whatever you think you need to have. You need to be realistic. So I think that

01:19:34.900 being realistic and prioritizing to the things that are important matters a lot. I also think,

01:19:40.500 you know, kind of something that Alan was saying with the history that you develop

01:19:43.700 with someone with the inside jokes and the subtle things, your attraction to the person you're with

01:19:52.060 can't be just sexual. Yes, you need to be sexually attracted to the person that you're with. Don't

01:19:58.120 compromise on that because you may think that you can go without it and that's not a big thing and

01:20:03.060 it'll develop or whatever. Chances are that's not the case. So don't set yourself up for failure,

01:20:09.940 but it can't be just about that. Over time, you want somebody who is going to be supportive of

01:20:17.380 the life that you want, who's going to help you succeed in the life that you want, that you're

01:20:23.220 going to enjoy spending time with. You know, Alan mentioned earlier that in the world we live in

01:20:28.140 today, our spouse makes up a much greater percentage of our time than at previous times.

01:20:34.540 they can be your the entirety of your family and the entirety of your friend circle depending on

01:20:42.460 your circumstance and where you face yourself this is your partner have someone that you like

01:20:47.640 and that's your friend and that you can get along with and that you enjoy their company

01:20:51.880 because you're going to be sharing a lot of each other's company so that compatibility is real

01:20:57.180 important. But what I'd like to say, too, before I get off my soapbox here is help each other.

01:21:07.960 And we do this in the AFA. Unfortunately, as is true all over the place, men are not in as high

01:21:16.340 of demand as women are. And I think men face that a lot and feel that a lot. I wish I could make it

01:21:21.360 magically different for you. It's not the world we live in right now. But lots of single ladies in

01:21:28.180 the AFA, lots of single gentlemen. Let's help each other to break through those things that hold us 1.00

01:21:37.620 back from having the kind of lives that we want. If there's social awkwardness amongst our brothers

01:21:43.680 and sisters in the AFA, let's help break down those barriers. Let's help role model success

01:21:50.680 and successful families and relationships, and let's help build that, not just for ourselves,

01:22:00.440 but once we've found it, let's help others to build that too. If we are concerned for their

01:22:06.900 well-being, we as a community can do a lot to help build and foster the development of families,

01:22:17.180 And that's one of the most beautiful things I've seen in the Astro Folk Assembly is people building families within the AFA.

01:22:24.920 And we're now at a point watching those families grow up that it's it's really special and it's proof that this, you know, it can happen.

01:22:33.120 It's a thing. A number of us have found ourselves there.

01:22:37.640 I built my family in the AFA. Quinton Erickson, our esteemed colleague, he and his wife,

01:22:47.000 Githya Katie Erickson, they built their family within the AFA. Watching these families

01:22:51.680 develop is a beautiful thing. There's plenty of hope. There's lots of good stuff. Don't be

01:22:59.000 forlorn. Me and Alan are talking about a lot of the negative things because we're trying to give

01:23:03.620 things to avoid or things to get past, there's a whole lot of success out there to be had

01:23:10.120 if we help one another. And also if we don't treat everything with the impermanence that is so,

01:23:20.820 we're in a culture where everything is disposable. I've seen as a sad truth,

01:23:25.500 everybody's job seems to be the new thing that is the indispensable thing.

01:23:30.920 relationships are disposable all too often people's core values or their religious choices

01:23:37.400 are disposable if it's preventing them from getting laid um i'm not trying to be crass

01:23:43.240 that's just something that i see a lot but man they won't take a day off from work they've got

01:23:49.400 punched that clock we should reevaluate some of our priorities to make sure we're putting those

01:23:57.320 in the right place and you know and it can be difficult it certainly was for me during various

01:24:10.160 periods of my life when things were not going as I thought they should but certainly it's been

01:24:18.180 easier since I found also true and since I found the traditionalist worldview which meshes well

01:24:25.520 with what i have always known but one of the things that um as mad as you've said number one

01:24:36.160 you know that we don't talk about enough is love you know that we love each other

01:24:42.000 um we love our faith we love our ancestors um but i but i think too the you know the the

01:24:50.960 is to live a life of joy, you know, it's to be open to those sorts of things, and

01:25:03.940 bad things happen, good things happen, but if you're open to the experience, and love your fate,

01:25:13.240 and love your life that will overcome a lot of other stuff you know if you're just

01:25:22.500 the like and again women can sense the guy creeping on them right but if you're just

01:25:30.260 there and celebrating yourself and celebrating the joy of being alive that can get you past

01:25:41.420 a lot of that initial awkwardness that people feel in the presence of new people.

01:25:50.200 So, ladies, help us out. 1.00

01:25:53.600 Women have a very particular and a very powerful ability to manipulate social situations. 1.00

01:26:01.640 And I don't use the word manipulate in a bad way, but to shape social interaction. 0.96

01:26:08.860 and i'm not saying that you need to like take one for the team and date these guys that you

01:26:15.120 don't want to be with or whatever i mean do that if you want to but what i'm saying is

01:26:21.560 help help folks out if you are a good looking woman you treating somebody like they matter 0.88

01:26:30.960 and making them feel special goes a long way to signaling to the other women in the room

01:26:37.980 and to the other men in the room to give that person a certain amount of value in how they

01:26:44.540 deal with them. It can make a world of difference. I'm not saying lead them on or anything else that

01:26:50.000 way. I'm just saying treating our shy gentlemen that are working on fixing it with some positivity

01:27:01.400 and not making them feel like they've got six heads when they decide to have the audacity to

01:27:06.700 talk to you, it goes a long way. And I think that if you've got it figured out, this for men and

01:27:16.260 women, let's help each other so that everybody else can have the happiness that we've found.

01:27:21.600 I wish when I was growing up, and I said when I was growing up, but as a young man,

01:27:26.040 I had people to help me through a lot of things. And I wouldn't have made some of the stumbles

01:27:31.780 that I made in my life. I'd like to be able, when I noticed that, to help our young men and women

01:27:39.160 to avoid those to the best of my ability. And if we're all doing that and looking out for each

01:27:43.740 other, I think there's a lot to be said for that and a lot to be gained from it. The other thing

01:27:48.000 I want to say that's just miserable and is epidemic amongst our folk and probably Western

01:27:56.460 society as a whole give thought to the person that you procreate with i've seen the most horrendous

01:28:08.780 and ugly custody situations by young people who just kind of made babies without any thought to

01:28:16.140 how they're going to raise them or towards the future and seen a lot of kids and a lot of i've

01:28:22.940 I've seen a lot of kids very badly affected by that.

01:28:25.700 And I've seen a lot of young men and women just devastated by the reality of

01:28:34.060 that situation.

01:28:35.920 And sometimes it's, you know, it's absolutely,

01:28:41.200 I don't think it's total thoughtlessness.

01:28:43.780 I'm, you know, for a lot of people, you know, they,

01:28:47.080 they're in a relationship and then they find also true.

01:28:50.360 And, but I think some of those core values, the traditionalist viewpoint, the ideas about race and tribe, you know, those should have been sorted out before the marriage.

01:29:06.940 And if you're, and if you're compatible with that other 88%, then the rest of it, you can negotiate your way through oftentimes.

01:29:17.200 But you're exactly right. You know, some, some, some. And this is just this transitional age that we're living in. You know, it's difficult. And there's no, I certainly don't claim to know the answer. It's one of the things that caused my divorce. The, you know, it's not there. There's no easy answer to it.

01:29:39.460 We all find ourselves, and here's the thing, and this is true of every topic we talk about,

01:29:48.620 certainly on the Adulting with Alan episodes, but also on any of the others.

01:29:53.560 You are where you are.

01:29:54.840 You can't go back.

01:29:55.960 You can't undo things.

01:29:57.200 You're in the situation that you're in, and you've got to start from here to get wherever

01:30:01.980 else you're going.

01:30:02.840 But I say this for the people out there who can affect that.

01:30:09.020 You are you save yourself a lot of heartache if you plan a little bit ahead of time, because it is very, very easy to get caught up emotionally in romantic situations.

01:30:26.500 And it can become very overpowering to your better judgment.

01:30:30.040 And I think men and women alike maybe experience it differently. Maybe a lot of it experienced the same. But we have all been made to behave foolishly due to, you know, lustful slash romantic circumstances in our lives.

01:30:49.560 If you have planning before you get in the situation, you're better served than if you're just reacting to the hand you're dealt.

01:30:59.060 I think, you know, most everybody listening to this show know what goes where and how babies are made.

01:31:08.300 A little bit of caution before you start a family with somebody that you don't want to necessarily think about raising the family with.

01:31:19.560 would do everybody a lot of good. And again, I'm talking in reserve terms, not to be soft on it,

01:31:29.580 but to be flexible. Life's life, and we all find different spots, and I'm not going to get on here

01:31:33.580 and tell you an unrealistic purity spiral of things. I'm just saying, as Aryan men and women,

01:31:41.900 we have an inherent nobility and responsibility that comes with it to try to make the best choices

01:31:48.320 that we can. And I'm saying, so we kind of started off today's show talking about fighting and the

01:31:58.720 arguments that come in a relationship. One of the biggest elements of the soul sickness our people

01:32:05.980 find ourselves in is the fact that we don't live whole lives that mesh together and synergize.

01:32:15.220 where one guy at work, and I know plenty of people like this when they find Ausatru. And again,

01:32:22.620 some of them have already made commitments and choices in their life. But if you have to be

01:32:31.200 secretive about who you are in your marriage, or who you are at work, or who you are in relationship

01:32:37.700 to your politics, to your core value, to your religious affiliation, to who you are as a

01:32:45.140 father, who you are as a husband, the more of those things that are incongruent, the

01:32:51.220 more problems metastasize and the more heartache that you have in your life trying to reconcile

01:32:57.420 them, the more you can structure from day one a life that all synergizes and matches

01:33:03.540 up with one another or with each piece that really is such a fundamental key to your overall health

01:33:13.140 and well-being is the idea of being whole and you do that by all those pieces match matching up

01:33:19.540 the more they don't match the more it wears over your over you over the course of your life

01:33:24.100 whole and holy have the same root word and that's certainly uh an aryan concept that um things that

01:33:34.660 are elegant um and holistic and whole are the holy things um and once you find that this is

01:33:45.860 going to bring out my the other point that i wanted to make um and before we start going to

01:33:50.500 questions maybe um the other point that i wanted to make is to express gratitude

01:33:56.580 um you know it's one of the things that we i think people have

01:34:05.780 even in a relationship you have this inherent idea that you know that if i

01:34:10.180 I, you know, that if I say, you know, I need you, I'm grateful for what you did, that that's going to make you less because you're relying on them.

01:34:23.980 And that, you know, it's the exact opposite, you know, because the more you build your partner up, the more you build yourself up because, you know, that's the team.

01:34:39.340 So awesome.

01:34:40.180 Austin in Wisconsin donated $50 to The Steeple.

01:34:43.780 I appreciate you, Austin.

01:34:45.000 Thank you very much.

01:34:46.920 And Adrian in Minnesota donated $25 to The Steeple and $25 to VNS.

01:34:55.040 Thank you both.

01:34:55.760 We appreciate you guys very much.

01:34:58.880 And Anna didn't ask me.

01:35:01.620 She asked you what you're drinking.

01:35:04.600 But I'm going to answer, even though she didn't answer me,

01:35:07.860 because I'm drinking homemade Gatorade.

01:35:13.400 How's that for exotic and traditional?

01:35:16.540 A hipster taught me how to make it.

01:35:19.640 I was going to say, if it's what I think it is, it's super traditional.

01:35:24.140 It's Posca.

01:35:26.140 You know, it's a takeoff on Posca.

01:35:31.100 And, you know, it's the drink that won the world.

01:35:33.640 It conquered the world. 0.98

01:35:36.340 The Romans.

01:35:37.860 not germania um true oh i am drinking a fine chianti uh gifted to me by an afa friend thank

01:35:49.300 you roy um and it's quite delicious it's been a long time since i had chianti so i'm i'm excited

01:35:56.260 about it so alan do you have more on the front end or would you like to start going to questions

01:36:05.300 No, let's go to questions. As you know, I could talk all day and often do, but let's see what it is that our audience wants to dig into on detail.

01:36:20.880 All right. Well, Tyler would like to dig in to, hey there, question in regards to marriage and family.

01:36:27.440 How should someone who is interested in Ausitru and who holds to the values of the AFA navigate a situation where their spouse is perhaps hesitant to explore religions outside of Christianity, due to both social and spiritual fears?

01:36:45.540 It appears there's more to this question.

01:36:48.660 In my situation in particular, I also have a stepdaughter whose father is a Christian pastor.

01:36:55.280 So needless to say, that also complicates my family situation.

01:36:59.840 I would be interested in getting involved in the AFA, so I'm trying to figure out how best to

01:37:04.800 navigate that situation as well. Thank you and much love to the AFA. Well, thank you, Tyler.

01:37:10.960 We appreciate you asking and we appreciate your support of the Ask True Folk Assembly and desire

01:37:16.720 to get more involved. Alan, how would you like to take a swing at that?

01:37:22.800 Right. Well, it's especially tough when, you know, when the partner is, you know, her father's a pastor, because, you know, you're not going to convert him and that he is going to be openly resistant to his daughter straying very far from the faith, from his faith.

01:37:44.840 I think, and this is one of the things that I've been trying to work on, like in our own lexicon in general, but I think the important thing is to demonstrate and emphasize the commonality between Christianity and also true.

01:38:14.840 The values, the underlying values, obviously the religious stuff is quite distinct, but I think paganism, which we are certainly in that broad category of religious practice, has gotten a bad rap, has gotten a bad reputation, and rightly so, because of the practitioners of Wicca, mostly.

01:38:42.340 and other pagan faiths rightly criticized by Benoit and others as, you know,

01:38:53.560 just being anti-traditional, anti-family, anti-traditional relationship.

01:39:00.420 And, you know, and so there's this broad brush that people paint pagans with.

01:39:09.660 And it's because, you know, the Wiccans are 50 years ahead of us on the curve of, you know, breaking out into modern society.

01:39:19.700 And because they are accepted by the progressivist ideology, then they can afford to be open and aggressive about their faith and practice in a way that is sometimes dangerous for us. 0.96

01:39:43.860 Um, all that being said, when you, when you're in a, when you're up close and personal, like around the dinner table, the thing to emphasize is, you know, the AFA believes in families.

01:39:58.920 The AFA believes in strong familial relationship. The AFA believes in men and women being two different sexes and without any overlap.

01:40:15.620 And those are the kinds of things that should ring true to the father, the pastor.

01:40:27.560 You know, to talk about the respect that we have for tradition, the respect that we have for our ancestors, the respect that we have for.

01:40:35.740 For, and I don't want this to sound the wrong way, but the respect that we have for others of different faiths, most different faiths, you know, and not to be negative, hyper negative about it. 0.94

01:40:58.880 You know, well, you Christians stole our stuff and Easter is not about Jesus, it's about bunnies. 0.83

01:41:05.720 And, you know, as I've said in other contexts, one of the, you know, we, most AFA members have matured out of that. 0.97

01:41:14.620 There used to be a lot of that, you know, I mean, a moot would be lots and lots and lots of Christian bashing.

01:41:20.380 And then we'd have a moot and go home past that.

01:41:24.500 And so the way to sell your spouse and at least get your father, her father, a little bit on your side is to emphasize how congruent we are with traditional Christianity.

01:41:48.900 And if he's a reader and is actually open to exploring the idea, because oftentimes pastor men, not always, of course, but oftentimes men become pastors because they are willing to dig into the spiritual minutia that the great majority of people have no interest in.

01:42:09.260 And there's a book out there called The Germanization of Christianity, where the author makes clear that Christianity changed very much by coming up through Europe in the way that it did.

01:42:27.260 and that had it remained only in the submitted countries,

01:42:34.120 it would look a lot more like Islam than it does.

01:42:40.340 So, and I appreciate, so a couple of things. 0.93

01:42:49.060 First, because I saw this over in the chat room,

01:42:51.340 new listeners, and we don't mention this as much as we should,

01:42:54.320 this show is very question audience participation question driven so please feel free to ask any

01:43:02.900 question that you want over on the side and our producer Nick will get that lined up for Alan and

01:43:07.540 I to address also you can send questions in at yeah I will answer all the questions until the

01:43:15.380 end now at some point I'm gonna say okay last question for the night if you send them in after

01:43:20.320 that maybe they'll get answered on the next show but we'll answer all questions um and you can send

01:43:27.200 them at any time if something comes to you throughout the week at vns at runestone.org

01:43:34.560 and we'd be happy to put those you know shuffle those in the line for the next broadcast

01:43:40.000 so tyler the question that you ask and keeping in mind that we are a question-driven show

01:43:47.360 when we answer these kind of questions we answer them for the person who asked but also for the

01:43:52.800 audience in general because every question you guys ask there's a lot of people listening

01:43:57.120 that have the same question or a very similar one so sometimes if we get out of

01:44:03.280 the exact parameters of the question you know that might be why and i also realize that

01:44:12.960 you're wise enough to know that we're not gonna have the perfect answer or know all the details

01:44:17.280 to your situation. There's some things in life that are hard that you can make your best choices

01:44:23.960 on trying to navigate, but there's not a perfect fix to all these things. One of those things,

01:44:29.560 being a stepdad. Being a stepdad is hard. Figuring out your role in the raising of the child

01:44:38.400 is very challenging, and that's a difficult undertaking. And, you know, as I'm sure you

01:44:46.320 know going in. And it's made even more so when the biological father and you have fundamental

01:44:53.000 differences and religion is one of those, especially if it's important enough to him

01:44:57.300 that he's become a pastor. So I think some of, you know, to follow along some of what Alan was

01:45:06.180 saying specifically in relation to the the raising of your

01:45:10.740 stepdaughter there. Well, and I don't know the type of

01:45:21.060 Christian that he is that used to have a value if he is a

01:45:25.560 traditionally minded Christian, then there's some things to

01:45:30.120 work with there. If he's one of these new rainbow flag, you 1.00

01:45:35.120 know gay is okay christian things i don't know what to do with that but if he is a uh a traditionally 0.66

01:45:44.120 minded christian honestly this is good advice regardless don't be an edgelord don't define

01:45:51.280 yourself by your difference enhance commonality that is good when you find good things that you

01:46:00.280 to share in common, embrace those. He needs to be able to

01:46:08.100 respect you as a man. And I don't mean in the sense of like,

01:46:11.600 you need to have the handshake battle to see who's got the best

01:46:14.280 grip. But he needs to see you as somebody who has values that

01:46:20.380 he is okay with his daughter being around that you are a

01:46:25.060 person that you treat his daughter well that you treat

01:46:30.280 your wife well that you are a respectable person um you mentioned that your wife and i can't i'm

01:46:39.640 having a technical difficulty i'm getting with nick on so i can't click back on the question

01:46:43.000 i'm assuming you guys are married um you mentioned a fear socially and religiously

01:46:52.360 that fear is tremendously lessened when you are open in the practice of your faith

01:47:00.280 and when you are also a good man.

01:47:05.540 If you hide who you are and all of a sudden it comes out,

01:47:11.740 everybody's hackles go up on like,

01:47:15.080 what's this secret other life that you're leading?

01:47:18.440 That is a recipe for failure and to amplify that fear response.

01:47:24.680 If you are openly Ausitru, 0.83

01:47:27.400 and as much as he goes on about you know whatever religious observance he's doing and whatever you

01:47:35.600 talk about the afa and you talk about you know man i was at mayday at the hof you know we were

01:47:40.560 celebrating summer mall and we were dancing around the maypole and whatever be proud of who you are

01:47:46.100 and what you believe showing to another man that you are not proud of who you are and what you're

01:47:52.520 doing makes us all think you're up to something and that's not a situation you want to be in

01:47:58.600 especially when you are involved in the raising of this man's child and with your wife whatever

01:48:05.280 fear she has the fear is lessened and she sees you and your religious practice and sees how not

01:48:13.000 scary it is sees how nice and well-adjusted and friendly and loving and good of a man you are

01:48:21.240 and that that is part of your faith, all of that goes well.

01:48:28.540 So being authentically and proudly ausitrue in every one of those circumstances is really important.

01:48:35.620 I would also say you can't come at it tomorrow and start being pushy about it.

01:48:40.780 If you have not been that way up to this point, that is a subtle thing that you do by living your values

01:48:48.240 and not by demanding that these other people become engaged in it.

01:48:54.620 The best thing that I think, and this is, I can't tell you that this is without peril,

01:49:01.200 but it needs to be done in the long run if this is a long-term situation you want to be in.

01:49:08.700 Join the AFA, do AFA stuff, bring your wife to AFA things.

01:49:15.600 She doesn't have to participate any more than she wants to, but she can see what goes on and see that it's not scary.

01:49:25.300 And have your daughter, and your daughter gets to play with the other AFA kids.

01:49:30.900 Like, wow, look how normal these people are.

01:49:33.560 Exactly.

01:49:34.120 And I think that a good way to, if you're not there yet to where she is willing to attend something with you, then show them our, like this channel.

01:49:49.460 If if your wife is someone who likes to think about these things deeply, Victory Never Sleeps, I hope, is a good way at least to entertain her and show her that we're not scary and perhaps to, you know, teach her some things about Ausatru and what it does that I think, you know, will demystify it.

01:50:09.880 we're scared so much of the unknown, this will make the unknown less spooky. But also what I

01:50:18.100 think is really cool and more digestible maybe if they don't want to spend hours listening to our

01:50:23.760 podcast, have them look at our slideshows. For every quarter, we do a slideshow of all the

01:50:31.880 different events that the AFA does. And there's big events and there's small events, but they're

01:50:37.640 all events with happy you know are people happy at the park doing fun things there's ladies there's

01:50:44.840 kids and there's normal looking people that does a lot again the fear factor comes a lot in the

01:50:53.560 unknowns i assume a lot of things about this pastor that i don't know everybody is different

01:50:59.320 but if he has scary misconceptions about these evil pagans seeing those things should make us

01:51:10.200 less scary if your wife is scared she shouldn't be after that now making them warm up to it or

01:51:18.040 be okay with it that's a different story but you're ahead of the game if you can make it not scary

01:51:22.700 And I think, again, like I said, having your wife attend an event and experience the hospitality of our ladies, seeing families and children running around and playing and having fun and realizing what exactly this looks like, not in concept, but in reality, I think that's your best bet.

01:51:44.800 And I would encourage you to do that.

01:51:46.220 So I've got to consult a little bit different system here.

01:51:53.540 Nick, could you feed me these questions in our chat that we've got over on the side on Teams?

01:52:00.820 Because my chat room here is froze up.

01:52:03.420 I can't look at the comments, and I also can't look at the private chat.

01:52:08.740 That's going to be a problem because I had to restart earlier, which meant the chat for me disappeared.

01:52:15.000 It's terrible. Look at me being the tech master.

01:52:22.000 On your computer, do you see private chat? Click that and there's the questions, sir.

01:52:28.000 Yes, I'm going to read one of these questions in the private chat because my technology skills are prevailing this evening.

01:52:37.000 A happy change. And although I guess, you know, since it's Matt and Nick, you know, and not my girlfriend, I can gloat about this victory, which is a bad thing to do in a relationship.

01:52:52.920 So we got a question. How do you view divorce? How much does that happen over there? I think

01:53:03.080 the questioner is from England, maybe Ireland, or does it happen at all? And so

01:53:10.480 there are several things in the traditional Norse society, Anglo-Saxon society,

01:53:22.920 Um, the Western civilization area peoples were among the very few who gave women the right to divorce. Um, I think divorce is, it's sad when it happens, especially if there are young kids involved. I think it's like in a, in the vast majority of situations, I think it's something that could be resolved without the most drastic step.

01:53:50.500 You know, you don't end a marriage because of, you know, minor differences over stuff, especially when you have kids there.

01:54:04.420 But at some point, yes, there certainly can be times when it is better for all concerned for a divorce to occur. 1.00

01:54:12.460 One of the things to know, and again, to frame things in context, modern divorce laws were specifically designed by feminists, and avowedly so by feminists like Gloria Steinem and others,

01:54:37.100 as a means of wealth transfer from men to women. 0.86

01:54:45.260 And maybe that's something you believe in.

01:54:47.560 I would hope not.

01:54:48.380 But having now been divorced for 12 years,

01:55:00.740 I can tell you that, you know, that funding two households is a struggle for both for all concerned.

01:55:11.180 And, you know, money is not everything. Money is not the primary thing.

01:55:14.660 But, you know, but we we. Americans, we Westerners fight enough about money as it is.

01:55:22.500 It is a struggle to live a good life, provide a good rearing to your children in an intact household.

01:55:35.520 And it is orders of magnitude more difficult to do it in a divided household, in a split household, in a post-divorce.

01:55:45.840 So. We and I don't know that we have an AFA statement of faith on it, but, you know, there's there's something there's certainly nothing non-religious about getting divorced from your spouse.

01:56:05.220 I think it's important when you're coming to a marriage to make your vows in a way that is a way that you can uphold it, which is something that I passed by when we were talking before.

01:56:24.900 But like if you, I think monogamy is important in a, you know, in a committed relationship, especially if you take a vow to do that.

01:56:34.840 The Vikings were not as strict about that, and I think much to their detriment.

01:56:46.500 But in a war of your society like that, where, you know, you're losing 10, 15% of your men every time you go to war, maybe that's a different situation. I don't know. I don't, you know, I certainly am not trying to reconstruct that past.

01:57:01.340 The thing to know is that, yes, women in Germanic tribal society had the right to divorce their men, but again, it happened in a more intact way.

01:57:17.840 You know, if you divorced your husband, you didn't have to get an apartment in a town where you just moved three years ago and don't know anybody.

01:57:29.000 You know, you could take your household stuff and move back to the next village or a couple of houses over where your father and your, you know, where all your family still lives.

01:57:42.200 So divorce is a very different animal in that sort of intact societal structure.

01:57:52.880 So the AFA, this is something important.

01:57:57.720 There are plenty of things in the AFA that we have hard line, 100% this, 0% that, all the way good, all the way bad.

01:58:06.360 But there's much more things that we as Aryan men and women have to apply our wisdom to, and we make choices.

01:58:17.280 Divorce is bad.

01:58:19.900 The AFA stance is divorce is bad.

01:58:22.800 Now, it may be much better than the alternative, but as a default position, divorce is suboptimal.

01:58:34.420 That said, living the rest of your life miserable is worse than that.

01:58:41.560 Being abused consistently is worse than that.

01:58:45.960 There's a lot of things that make a divorce something worth considering.

01:58:51.060 i think what alan said specifically in terms of children you should spend some extra thought and

01:59:00.460 extra consideration on that because it makes the rearing of children much more traumatic and much

01:59:05.300 more difficult but again even then if the disorder divorce is due to you know abuse

01:59:13.920 or other, you know, serious things. No, we wouldn't try to forcibly enforce a couple staying

01:59:21.320 together if there were, was a danger involved or a significant amount of mistreatment.

01:59:29.520 But also we live in a time where divorce is very, very common. I don't want to be a hypocrite. This 0.88

01:59:36.140 is my second marriage. I got a divorce from my first wife. It happens and it happens all

01:59:43.900 too often it has become the you know i think that it has become the majority situation

01:59:50.060 in america that the majority of marriages fail that's a very sad statement about the society

01:59:58.220 that we live in make good choices to try to you avoid a lot of that if you establish these things

02:00:06.540 up front. But yeah, it's very common over here. And the questioner is a gentleman in

02:00:15.200 Finland. And so I don't know what Finnish divorce rates are, but they're very high in

02:00:21.440 the United States. Marriage is really important. It was important to our ancestors. It was

02:00:28.100 important in the Viking Age. It was important in the Germanic tribal period. The monogamy

02:00:35.720 of relationships amongst the germanic tribes was remarkable to the romans that encountered them

02:00:42.280 as kind of a standout trait like wow these people treat their marriages more seriously than we treat

02:00:49.160 ours um and i think there's there's there's value in that so yeah the afa stance is divorce is bad

02:00:59.560 Try to avoid being in that spot. And also, once you're committed, try to work out what the problem is instead of viewing everything as something you can easily discard.

02:01:15.700 But, yeah, it's certainly not forbidden in the AFA, but it is something that you should, you know, it is a bad situation that you should try to avoid if there is a reasonable way to do that.

02:01:27.900 Right. And the, you know, and of course I had no cause to know any of this stuff before I got divorced, but one of them, but one of the strongest indicators of mental illness is the, is the being, being the child of a divorce parents, you know, because it's, it's hard enough for parents to go through all this stuff and navigate the complexity.

02:01:57.900 of a divorce, but for a child, especially a small child, it has permanent and long lasting effects.

02:02:09.900 I am very, very fortunate, and I remarked to Mandy just a couple of days ago,

02:02:16.900 When I see the horrible, torturous situations that people find themselves in with custody battles and having a spouse that either does not want you involved in your child's life or wants to raise your child entirely contrary to your values, it's a horrible situation.

02:02:43.800 My parents got divorced when I was in fifth or sixth grade, thereabouts.

02:02:53.380 And looking back, I really wish that wasn't the case.

02:02:58.060 It's caused me to this day to have a much less close relationship to my father than I wish I would have had.

02:03:05.960 And it took a lot of years away from time that I could have really used my father in my life.

02:03:11.860 and that was circumstance and I don't think I even had a bad spot I don't think that you know

02:03:17.580 my parents tried to keep me from one another or there was anything that way but

02:03:21.380 stuff just kind of works out that way it's never it's very often not good for the child again

02:03:29.220 if you find yourself procreating with someone who is monstrous and abusive and bad then that

02:03:37.420 obviously changes the equation.

02:03:40.400 If you are a female in a relationship with an

02:03:44.600 author, and if you're feeling abuse, you let us know.

02:03:50.240 Absolutely.

02:03:53.080 So here's the thing.

02:03:56.180 Put this out there, and we should put this out there more often.

02:04:00.480 Whoever you are, if you listen to this broadcast,

02:04:02.940 and you're in an abusive relationship, or you're going through

02:04:07.360 something in your life to where you need some counsel on, please reach out to our Gothar or

02:04:12.440 reach out to me personally, and I would be very happy, we would be very happy to do our best to

02:04:17.080 help you navigate your situation, and yeah, please keep that in mind, because it is something that we

02:04:24.300 end up doing, and as a note, I had to refresh, that's why I'm on the other side of the screen

02:04:30.400 now, but now I have access to the questions once again. So, any details on plans for the

02:04:39.300 next Hoff? Fraze Hoff is the next Hoff. Plan has always been on that one to have it in 0.72

02:04:46.960 either eastern Ohio or western Pennsylvania. That's still the plan. That's where we're

02:04:54.240 looking inside baseball stuff we have already been looking at properties and things we have

02:05:11.520 one that somebody is going to inquire and check into possibly as early as this next weekend

02:05:18.400 but we are well engaged in that search there's no promise on the timetable

02:05:23.040 but that's where we're at working on it and the generous donation we received this last week has

02:05:30.560 you know accelerated that timetable in a really really beautiful way so that's where we're at on

02:05:36.400 that can you guys put out or put your library of old literature on a dvd and sell it or put it on

02:05:47.120 bit torrent it would save bandwidth and time for downloading i'd pay a hundred dollars for a dvd

02:05:55.600 um i don't know how involved that process is if we had somebody who wanted to do that or

02:06:05.600 volunteer to do that i'm certainly not opposed to either of those things that you mentioned

02:06:11.680 i don't know how to do i'll say if if they're specifically meaning like all the files and

02:06:17.680 stuff that's on our runestone library by virtue of how you know i'm transitioning it from

02:06:23.840 wordpress to wix or whatever uh i'm down i'm having to download all the files myself

02:06:30.160 so i will have them all downloaded theoretically yeah i could probably put them all on a disc

02:06:36.560 um and we could probably sell it to somebody what about the bit torrent situation um i haven't

02:06:48.260 torrented in like 10 15 years and i never uploaded torrents i don't know how that works i always

02:06:54.320 downloaded them so answer to you morris is if we could figure that out or if you wanted to maybe

02:06:59.620 reach out to nick on the back end with an idea not opposed to it but with the limited volunteers that

02:07:07.460 we have now in that area it's not something i think that we would devote a lot of resources

02:07:11.700 towards but if it's a relatively simple process i wouldn't be opposed to the torrent situation

02:07:18.020 or something similar so alan what do you think of people like jordan peterson

02:07:26.980 Well, you know, I think George Peterson has a lot of valid things to say about the nature of relationships and about the nature of the underlying psychological structure.

02:07:42.360 I think he's been a very strong advocate of the genetic distinction between men and women.

02:07:49.880 I don't think he's right about everything, but I admire the strength that he has shown for, you know, for defending his traditional viewpoint about things.

02:08:02.720 and I think he's made a lot of friends and you know he's one of those guys who who kind of lives

02:08:11.380 in our quadrant I think um we would disagree about some things but I think by and large

02:08:17.320 as an advocate as an outspoken and eloquent advocate of uh traditional viewpoints I think

02:08:26.200 I think he's moving the ball in the right direction.

02:08:30.760 Again, I disagree with him about some things, obviously,

02:08:34.700 but I read his book and, you know, I got a lot out of it.

02:08:41.500 Now, again, disagreement, sure, but by and large, he's on the team, I think.

02:08:50.500 Yeah, I like Jordan Peterson.

02:08:51.900 um clearly and and this is this is the important thing we we do this a lot and i see a lot of

02:09:02.300 infighting a lot of the time when people that you know agree with us 70 percent we want to be mad

02:09:11.700 about the 30 percent instead of excited about the 70 and we take that to a much in the circles that

02:09:19.000 many of us run in, and I'm not exaggerating, there's a lot of us that are 97% on the same team, 0.61

02:09:26.180 yet we want to be really mad at the 3% and not the 97% commonality. I don't think that does us

02:09:32.700 any favors. In the greater cultural milieu that we find ourselves in, Jordan Peterson is much

02:09:41.900 closer to being on our team than being on, you know, the enemy's team. And I think that

02:09:47.460 there's a lot of wisdom there. Certainly, I don't agree with all of his conclusions.

02:09:55.200 You know, I believe he's, he's a Catholic, I don't, you know, obviously support Christianity. 0.94

02:10:03.040 But traditional relationships and traditionalism in general, is a much better thing than 0.58

02:10:11.100 progressivism or you know the chaos that those forces have come to embody

02:10:19.120 and the middle is really dropped out to where everybody's been pushed to one of the

02:10:25.740 ends of that there's not a lot of middle anymore there's sane people wanting healthy things for

02:10:33.160 society and there is deeply mentally ill people wanting very bad things for society

02:10:40.140 And I think Jordan Peterson falls on the sane end of that. 0.97

02:10:45.380 Agreed.

02:10:49.880 So, also from Fenwraith, what do you think is the correct way to deal with things like porn addiction?

02:11:00.480 Alan, your thoughts?

02:11:04.220 Just say no.

02:11:05.340 so i'm a push on that what as opposed to someone looking to pick up a porn addiction habit just say

02:11:17.060 no i think is a good good advice but if we have people who find themselves in the midst of that

02:11:23.820 what would you recommend i don't know outside my skill set um you know when i

02:11:30.300 I will tell you that I have addictive characteristics of this addictive genealogy

02:11:37.440 in my family. And in the way back when, when I was a younger lad and experimenting with

02:11:46.020 chemical enhancement, I dabbled with addiction there.

02:11:53.480 I, you know, there are strategies. I assume that there are strategies out there on the Internet. You know, YouTube tells me everything else I need to know. So I'm sure there's a, you know, I'm sure that, you know, read the Havamal and think pure thoughts.

02:12:11.560 You know, the and and put yourself in the situation where that becomes the thing, you know, so stay, stay in the living room and stop going out in the bathroom.

02:12:29.720 So I apologize for being flippant.

02:12:32.620 Well, you're fine, because my next comment is, I don't know a better way to put it, but it has an interesting extra meaning in this context.

02:12:43.880 Idle hands with the devil's workshop.

02:12:46.840 So that said, and I really do mean this, though.

02:12:55.380 There's some things with addiction.

02:12:57.140 sometimes addiction be it chemical or be it psychological and i suppose some of those

02:13:06.200 things are chemical too with dopamine and other other things um

02:13:11.420 so a lot of times it's self-medicating other times it is a hyper focus or an obsessing about

02:13:24.440 something. I think both of those things are very often made better by touching grass as the kids

02:13:36.040 say. If you're by yourself and alone, you are more likely to engage in negative behavior than if you

02:13:48.000 are out living and enjoying life with other people and other community. We substitute a lot

02:13:59.580 of the mental security and mental health that we get from our friends and our family and our

02:14:06.100 community. And it all goes back to this. So we've got a common theme. I often describe things that

02:14:14.860 are like that as masturbatory because they are. We have things that we do to like make ourselves

02:14:22.200 feel better about ourselves or waste time or whatever we're doing instead of sitting around

02:14:29.180 with the uncomfortable awkwardness of having empty lives. Do stuff. Go out and fill that void

02:14:38.080 with community, with productivity, and I don't just mean fiscal productivity. Sure, if you can

02:14:45.000 put that into being an entrepreneur or doing something great that way and you're passionate

02:14:49.040 about it, okay. But spend that time going out there and talking to girls. If it has a

02:14:56.540 must-ful element to it, then spend that time out there engaging in real-world situations with the

02:15:04.100 opposite sex. If it's just a need to feel wanted or good or whatever the deal is, go out and make 0.93

02:15:13.120 some friends, go out and do stuff. And I don't, and again, I'm not, I'm not trying to be pearl

02:15:20.560 clutchy on it or whatever. But the question was asked with the addiction. The addiction implies

02:15:26.580 more than a casual consumption it implies a being compelled to feeling like you're beyond your power

02:15:35.300 to make decisions not to and you don't want to be in a spot where you can't choose one of the most

02:15:41.700 fundamental things to our philosophy and our worldview is that as arian people and arian

02:15:47.940 means noble it's a word that that means nobility not in the sense that we're better than everybody

02:15:54.100 else though that you know not in the sense that it's some kind of an inherent thing but it's that

02:16:00.980 it's something that we owe it to ourselves to be and embody it is a defining characteristic of our

02:16:09.540 people of our ancestors and something we ought to live up to the nobility in that one of those

02:16:15.700 standards that you live up to as a noble person is making choices and dealing with consequences

02:16:24.740 of choices you make you're not at the whims of your addictions or other people

02:16:33.220 you choose how to live your life and if you are not able to choose whether to consume something

02:16:39.620 or not consume something that's a situation you want to to remedy i think filling your

02:16:49.380 down time time that you would normally be preyed upon by intrusive thoughts or by urges or by

02:16:58.580 you know whatever's going on that's causing you to engage in an addictive

02:17:02.340 activity, filling that time with something meaningful in the real world that is beneficial,

02:17:10.260 I think that's always a good option. The less downtime you have, the less opportunity you have

02:17:16.140 to revel in your addiction. And I think that's, you know, something I'd certainly advise everybody

02:17:23.800 to do. Again, like Alan said, too, in the world we live in, that's a thing. It's a thing a lot

02:17:28.960 young man have young men have talked about that they're dealing with something that's surprisingly

02:17:34.080 or maybe not surprisingly but our gothar council people on from time to time and you know this is

02:17:43.200 a strategy that i've seen be helpful to folks in that situation for what it's worth um

02:17:51.360 Um, so from Tyler, it's hard to discern if Christianity is on the rise, specifically in America.

02:18:04.900 What are the potential repercussions for pagans in a resurgent Christian West?

02:18:13.080 Alan.

02:18:13.380 Well, again, I think what we traditionalist pagans want to try to do is to make sure that we build inroads with traditionalist Christians and emphasize the compatibility that we have.

02:18:34.160 I think to the extent that Christianity is resurgent, it is resurgent specifically among the hardline traditionalist faiths.

02:18:43.380 I haven't looked at the numbers in a long time, but I think, you know, a lot of the analysis that was going on in, you know, 2015, 20, 30 years ago was that as the church got softer on its moral stance, that's why people drifted away from the church.

02:19:03.840 Because if there's no difference between being a Christian, not being a Christian, then why go, you know, why be, you know, why espouse something that, first of all, most modern Christianity is quite deviant from traditional practice of Christianity. 0.96

02:19:28.700 And I think it uses Christianity as an excuse to deviate from Western civilization, which is more important than Christianity.

02:19:37.380 So I think the way to do it is to, you know, is to emphasize the our compatibility. 0.71

02:19:45.760 I can tell you that I was I didn't go to Charlottesville, but I was in Pikesville before that.

02:19:53.920 And there were lots and lots of Christians there, and we got along very well.

02:19:58.960 A lot of them used the Viking symbology in the way that they defend their faith.

02:20:10.680 So, you know, we can get along.

02:20:17.900 I would much rather have that problem than the opposite.

02:20:23.920 I'd like to, you know, first suggest there isn't the idea that there's a, you know, that paganism is a thing.

02:20:34.160 It's not. Christianity is a thing. There may be a number of sects of Christianity, but as a general concept, there is a commonality that unites them.

02:20:45.080 There isn't that under paganism. So much of what people call paganism is licensed for degeneracy and a insincere and childish daddy issues, fatty cult thing.

02:21:09.500 That's not what we're doing.

02:21:13.140 I don't first, I don't see Christianity on the rise in America. 0.85

02:21:17.900 I don't see that at all.

02:21:19.520 It is much less Christian than it was when I was growing up. 0.91

02:21:26.540 So I think the question is highly speculative because there's no scenario that I see some kind of theocratic takeover of the United States. 0.99

02:21:37.500 It is true.

02:21:38.940 I think it is true that people are casting about for spiritual meaning and some of that, you know, and they can explore the shallow pool of Christianity or they can come home to their own faith.

02:22:03.200 hopefully more of the latter as we reach out with our next hoth.

02:22:10.540 And there's things that ebb and flow. So yes, there's people that are growing very dissatisfied

02:22:16.740 with the lack of meaning in the world that the modern West has created. And some of those people

02:22:25.580 do want to find religion we have a really big rise of people that lean hard into the degeneracy and

02:22:33.500 i don't see that that's stopping when we have people that want to come to religiosity

02:22:41.100 i don't think we see the surge in the like

02:22:48.460 everybody's welcome we don't really stand for anything christianity that characterizes

02:22:53.980 a lot of modern christianity i see a surge in more traditional sects of christianity but i don't

02:23:02.220 often see people in our circles necessarily stay there we do see a lot of people that

02:23:08.380 were raised in christian environments that no longer hold to any of the core values that used

02:23:13.980 to define those environments we see those people open up to coming home to aussitrew and we've

02:23:19.660 had a lot of those people join so i think it's good if people want to return to traditionalism

02:23:26.300 and traditional religion i think that will help us grow and won't hurt us i think the distance

02:23:33.260 between the greater american theocratic empire is so vast that between there everything that

02:23:43.180 move towards that would also build the AFA and swell our numbers and I think as that happens we

02:23:50.540 would in we would find points of commonality and you know it's hard to game what an end result of

02:23:58.140 that is but there's certainly nothing like that anywhere close to you know in our foreseeable

02:24:03.100 future in the meantime like I said about Jordan Peterson we can celebrate the you know people

02:24:11.260 coming home to sanity, that builds the AFA's numbers. I don't think that Christianity has 0.96

02:24:19.400 the stranglehold on morality anymore that it had at one point. And so I think that more people

02:24:26.640 wanting to live traditional and moral lives is a good thing. And I don't like to categorize us in

02:24:33.140 any way with paganism because that word doesn't have a meaning that is is valid other than it

02:24:42.460 means not christian um here's a question do you have like class type studies or do you just want

02:24:58.560 everybody to read all this on their own i'm a know-nothing kind of guy who feels pulled to more

02:25:05.920 ancestral faith practice listen yeah the question cuts off but sure i think we get the point on that

02:25:17.280 um so sorta um myself and uh witness fawn harrell go through the lore on this program

02:25:28.560 twice a month pretty extensively and we try that's not beginner lore though that you guys are doing

02:25:35.280 well it's it's not but it is accessible because we break down the points into digestible things

02:25:41.360 and we answer the questions so i think one of the most important things is like right now yes

02:25:47.120 read the read the core material that's cool you don't have to read thousands of pages of lore

02:25:56.080 to participate in the gift cycle with our gods

02:25:59.640 and to come home to Ausatru.

02:26:01.460 It's not a study project.

02:26:04.280 That's not how religion is.

02:26:07.280 Join the AFA, show up to local events,

02:26:12.540 learn as you do, learn as you go, and ask questions.

02:26:17.240 If you don't know enough to where you've decided

02:26:20.760 this is something you want to do,

02:26:22.920 please feel free to ask any of us questions.

02:26:25.240 is why i like uh and was encouraging you to look into the victory never sleeps on the lore studies

02:26:31.880 because so much of the show is answering questions doesn't matter how well read or

02:26:37.720 not one is if you have a question just ask and we're really happy to jump in and talk you through

02:26:42.600 it in a traditional society every person wasn't you know a lower expert you go and you participate

02:26:52.680 and you pick things up through the culture over time and through talking to the people that do it

02:26:57.800 talking to your elders talking to the priests and and learning as you go now as opposed to

02:27:05.240 some previous structures in the past we don't want to put any hurdle between you and the lord

02:27:10.280 by all means please go read it but we're very happy to get this going in a very organic way

02:27:17.880 for new people one thing that i would encourage you to read if you'd like though that does kind

02:27:22.360 of encapsulate exactly what the afa believes is the also true true log model it's basically our

02:27:27.960 statement of belief you can find it at runestone.org the purpose of that was to simplify

02:27:36.440 what is fundamental to afa also true practice as a place to start from but again any questions that

02:27:45.560 you might have you can email me personally mattflavelle at runestone.org i'd be happy to

02:27:53.480 answer anything to the best of my ability any of our gothar would be happy to answer your questions

02:27:59.400 and have a conversation with you and you know help you work through anything you might be struggling

02:28:03.880 on as far as structured classes sometimes we have some of that at our hoffs a number of local

02:28:12.840 groups that get together will have lore study as part of their mood we're certainly open to

02:28:18.520 that in the future but i don't think we have really like a curriculum to put one through

02:28:23.560 at this point but yeah please ask anything you want and check this out in the real world you

02:28:30.280 learn this by practice not by study study helps but practice is what's essential we should let's

02:28:37.560 work on that let's put it let's put together an afa 101 are you volunteering yep all right

02:28:47.320 well then we will talk about doing that i know that's something a lot of people will want we

02:28:53.000 have tried those in the past and the participation didn't really flesh out but i think it's time we

02:29:00.280 try again um okay this one's for you alan why the two-headed eagle is that for germany

02:29:13.560 um i think it has a common origin uh the the this behind me is my own personal banner that i

02:29:23.000 I had pieced together Lothie's many years ago, but, and I don't, if Richard was here,

02:29:37.120 I would try to talk him through some of the, some of the symbology on it.

02:29:41.520 The two-headed eagle represents, and a lot of the same, is a lot of the symbology that Janus had in the Roman world.

02:29:56.620 The two-headed eagle represents the division and earthwhile mastery over both the physical and the ethereal realm.

02:30:19.360 Is that a stuffed pig that is gripping it at the top?

02:30:26.620 okay well and see again wow i didn't think you could see that that well yeah it's on the other

02:30:34.220 side it's it's a stuffed pig and the on the other side yeah there's the pig and there's b um so

02:30:41.100 a long long long time ago i went to the um a a mead hall moot that they had in

02:30:54.380 I think it was in Mississippi. Maybe it was in Arkansas,

02:30:59.380 but I think it was in Mississippi and my mead,

02:31:03.100 the B represents the judge's mead and my mead won that competition,

02:31:09.740 the judge's mead and the pig represents the way the AA does their mead

02:31:16.700 judging competition is they have like the judges who sit and sip and,

02:31:21.380 you know, take a long time distinguishing the characteristics of the mead, and then they pass

02:31:27.380 the mead down to what they call the mead hogs, which is the less civilized participants at the

02:31:36.180 at the far end of the table, and my mead won both competitions. 0.69

02:31:42.580 So that's why I proudly keep the pig and the bee on my banner.

02:31:48.100 learn something every day alan makes a good mead

02:31:53.400 this is this is well known and established alan makes a good mead

02:31:59.540 i appreciate pretty much the primary uh ritual mead we use anytime he's traveling anywhere

02:32:05.460 alan is also generous with the mead that he makes that's the only reason you guys let me go to stuff

02:32:11.660 I mean, yeah, kind of sort of.

02:32:16.500 All right.

02:32:17.720 So our next deal here.

02:32:21.820 All right.

02:32:31.240 From Rando User.

02:32:34.140 I'm in an abusive relationship.

02:32:36.040 I live in supposedly the greatest country on earth that totally hates me.

02:32:42.340 Can I get some help here?

02:32:45.320 Alan, would you like to respond to that?

02:32:47.660 The answer is yes, we will help you.

02:32:49.660 You need to email our Gothar, particularly the Githias, but we will reach out to you and try to help you.

02:32:59.980 Um, you know, if you are in an abusive relationship, we will try to figure out how to get you out

02:33:08.900 of that.

02:33:09.980 Um, I mean, that's, that's, uh, I, I sympathize, I empathize with your situation.

02:33:19.940 I have, uh, I dated a girl who was in an abusive relationship before I dated her.

02:33:26.780 I've seen the outcome of that sort of stuff.

02:33:30.440 It's horrible.

02:33:32.060 It's bad.

02:33:35.120 Other people don't hate you.

02:33:38.700 That's what that guy has told you. 1.00

02:33:40.860 He is a liar. 1.00

02:33:43.080 He is using that to control you. 1.00

02:33:46.860 Don't believe it.

02:33:49.520 We will help you.

02:33:53.240 So there's a couple of ways to take the question.

02:33:56.780 And not knowing anything or even the gender of the person that expressed it.

02:34:02.120 First, 100%, like, if you are legitimately in a romantic relationship that is abusive, we would be very glad to help you please reach out to any one of us.

02:34:19.420 I'm going to go with a different option on this because I don't think that's how this question was intended.

02:34:23.920 but everyone who is listening. If that is your situation, contact the GOTHAR, contact them right

02:34:31.720 now, and we would be very, very happy to talk to you and help you navigate your way to a place

02:34:37.960 where you are safe and you are healthy and where you're on the road to having a good, healthy,

02:34:43.640 positive life. We would love to help with that in any way that we could. If the meaning of this is

02:34:51.080 relationship you're in that is abusive is with your country that doesn't like you

02:34:58.120 we can help with that too i think a lot of people feel

02:35:04.520 a lot of um young straight white males in this country feel very mistreated by our country and i

02:35:15.160 think there's ways to where people are mad about it you know ironically and ways to where it is

02:35:20.520 literally driving many young men to suicide. If you are looking for sense in the world and you feel

02:35:30.220 like the country's turned against you and you're unwanted and any of those things, chances are 0.57

02:35:38.420 you're wanted here in the Ask True Folk Assembly. You should give it a try. We would love to help

02:35:43.720 you find worth and meaning in a community that doesn't hate you and that wants you to be successful.

02:35:50.520 um that's what we're building here a lot of uh we get a lot of different people that listen to

02:35:56.840 the program that um you know have different levels of understanding of what we do

02:36:02.700 in the AFA and I mean there's different levels to what we do and how much you want to participate

02:36:08.920 in it in the AFA though Alan mentions the Kali Yuga earlier or the wolf age yeah there's a lot

02:36:17.620 of bad things going on in the world. But in the AFA, we're building a golden age within the husk 0.95

02:36:24.140 of the crumbling world around us. If we can help make the bigger world a better place,

02:36:31.360 by all means, we want to be part of that. But in the meantime, what we can do is we have the

02:36:37.400 ability to affect our folk in the Ausatrua folk assembly in a significant and meaningful way.

02:36:46.000 it one of the most beautiful things to me is when we receive emails and responses and people that

02:36:55.440 tell us that the afa has literally saved their life that the afa has you know brought meaning

02:37:05.160 to their life and that they felt like they came home when they joined the afa can't promise you

02:37:11.420 that that's what you'll feel but i hope it is and i'd like you to give it a chance to if you'd

02:37:18.700 consider you know reaching out learning about us and if you're interested joining us and being part

02:37:25.220 of what we're doing because there's a lot of love and a lot of beautiful things here that we would

02:37:29.840 encourage all of our folk to be a part of would someone be welcome to attend an event without

02:37:38.720 committing to the worship aspects until they see what they entail absolutely absolutely we're not

02:37:47.440 anyone listening

02:37:50.960 we're not silly we don't i don't believe that it's a reasonable ask for you to be able to

02:38:01.920 sincerely devote yourself to the worship and loyalty to divinity without

02:38:11.600 getting to know that divinity without getting to know what that worship looks like

02:38:16.560 nobody asks you to accept things sight unseen in the afa check it out come to an event see

02:38:25.440 see what's going on see how we do things oh i will what i do ask is if you do come to something

02:38:33.920 that you come with an open heart with an open mind and that you allow yourself to

02:38:41.360 be open to developing those things and for most most and for most of our hoffs we're gonna ask

02:38:48.960 you to allow yourself to be vetted a little bit you know we just give us a call talk to one of 0.99

02:38:57.840 the gothar so that we know who you are when you get there and you know yeah don't be a part of

02:39:04.080 the people yes but that's the thing if you look on our calendar events and i'd encourage everybody

02:39:10.640 to go do that so this is a cool thing and it's something i'm proud of and makes me happy so go

02:39:15.440 do this thing look at our calendar on runestone.org we have calendar of events and to make it easy to

02:39:24.160 navigate we color coordinate to the different hoff districts and we have the little two-letter

02:39:29.520 what state you're in or what country you're in on where those events are

02:39:35.440 and i think that there may very well be something near most of you guys who are in this chat room

02:39:41.680 See what's going on.

02:39:43.140 Every one of those events has a contact person who's hosting it.

02:39:47.520 Reach out.

02:39:49.100 Yeah, we may ask you, you know, what's your name so we can make sure that you're not a sex offender and scary to our children.

02:39:59.080 But that's the big requirement, and then we'd like to have you come out and see what we're doing.

02:40:06.820 Yeah, it's really special.

02:40:08.600 We've spent a lot of time making it.

02:40:10.140 I think it's really cool, but it's also a testament to our folk builders that work really hard to host these local events.

02:40:17.940 And we all, we all had a first time that we, although mine was 20 years ago, literally, you know, but there was all for each and all of us.

02:40:33.640 There was a first time when we had never been to an AFA, we had never been to an awesome true event.

02:40:39.200 We had never met another ositruer or heathen or odinus. 0.70

02:40:44.400 And so we go in and we take that risk and we go in and say, what's going on in there?

02:40:53.920 Then it's all cool.

02:40:56.700 Yeah, that's a thing.

02:40:58.160 every, every place that you see that we have a Hoff or that we have a successful community of

02:41:04.340 AFA members started with one person, just like the rest of us who said, Hey, I wish there was

02:41:11.720 something near me. How come there's not? Well, because we don't have anybody there to host it.

02:41:18.580 What do you need to do to host it? Well, cool. Let's set you up and you can host stuff.

02:41:24.240 That's how everything got started.

02:41:26.500 Sometimes it, you know, takes a long time to develop.

02:41:29.520 Sometimes it develops quickly.

02:41:31.200 So a lot of the time it's somewhere in between.

02:41:34.200 But they're, you know, oftentimes very normal men and women who are committed to wanting to make this work and want to make something happen.

02:41:43.420 They gather folk around them and then a community happens.

02:41:47.400 Every one of us started somewhere.

02:41:48.900 Every one of us didn't know about this, didn't know what it was going to be like and had to feel it out.

02:41:56.300 A lot of us had really humble starts.

02:41:58.900 I've told the story before, but I remember the first time that I went to, like, who are these, you know, oddball people?

02:42:03.960 I mean, what's going on here?

02:42:05.140 This is crazy.

02:42:06.020 I was, it was in a park, but it was surrounded by these woods.

02:42:09.440 And I was creeping around in the woods, peeking around trees, kind of seeing what was going on and who these people were.

02:42:15.880 We all go through that, you know, just wondering.

02:42:18.900 And the only way to know and to defeat the concern of the unknown is show up and see.

02:42:26.960 Maybe you're going to love it.

02:42:29.280 I mean, I suppose there's a chance you won't, but I think there's a really good chance that you might.

02:42:34.520 So I would encourage you to reach out to anybody who hosts any of those things or any of our other AFA contacts,

02:42:40.760 and we can get you set up and all figured out.

02:42:43.380 But no, we don't expect for you to sign up and be 100% committed to the worship of our gods without ever experiencing anything or ever knowing anything about it.

02:42:54.100 We've never asked that of you.

02:42:55.640 It's not fair.

02:43:00.480 What does the black sun mean to you?

02:43:06.100 Alan, I think it's referring again to your banner.

02:43:08.720 i will be glad to have a conversation with you on a personal level about what that means and

02:43:19.120 even about the rest of all the rest of stuff that's some of the but now we're getting into

02:43:24.320 the more esoteric side of it that i don't usually talk about on the interwebs

02:43:29.520 because you know how I am about that stuff um so I'll throw this out there too um AFA we use the

02:43:41.280 Black Sun imagery or what's come to be known as the Black Sun imagery for a number of things you

02:43:47.420 may notice we use that as a as a halo around divinity and around our our ascended heroes

02:43:56.640 in red and in gold around gods and it's a solar symbol of power of light of nobility of brightness

02:44:09.540 of noble brightness lighting up darkness and lighting up the world around it of power emanating

02:44:17.060 from the central point or from the sacred center or from the divinity or ascended person of

02:44:29.800 greatness. It's a very ancient symbol. It's something you see a lot of varieties of

02:44:36.200 representations of back in the migration period in the Germanic tribes. It develops in a lot

02:44:44.960 of different ways. The one we most commonly use is the 12 spoke, because that, you know, is a very

02:44:51.160 solar, that is the full-on solar imagery of it with the months and the rotational pattern of it.

02:45:02.160 But it's a very powerful symbol to our folk. It always has been. But I think a lot of people have

02:45:07.760 different personal associations with it. And again, if you reach out to Alan on the side,

02:45:12.700 and he'll have a deep conversation with you about it.

02:45:17.820 Is there any, okay, so this is from Morris again.

02:45:21.380 Is there any interest in training on AI

02:45:24.400 on all your old literature and making a virtual go-fi? 0.81

02:45:29.900 AI often gives silly answers.

02:45:33.880 So that's a, that is a nuanced question.

02:45:38.600 No, the idea of a virtual go-fi is offensive

02:45:41.180 on the face of it.

02:45:42.700 But having a AI curated storehouse of collected written works and collected wisdom so that, you know, that could be accessed efficiently, I think that's a nice idea.

02:45:58.580 And I think that's probably, you know, something certainly for the future. 0.91

02:46:02.780 But, you know, creating an AI Goethy is offensive to those of us that are Goethar. 0.98

02:46:10.020 And I don't think you necessarily meant it that way. 0.95

02:46:12.200 I'm just putting it out there as a concept.

02:46:15.740 There's a lot more that goes into not just knowing the lore or knowing the written material, but having the wisdom to apply it and to piece it together in the way that's beneficial, because this is very much an art as opposed to a science.

02:46:35.980 And AI is increasingly good at science, but it's not good at art.

02:46:43.340 And there is an art to how to weave together all the pieces of collected lore and collected wisdom of our folk in a way that's beneficial that I don't think can be done without the directing hand of an individual with will and connection to the divine.

02:47:02.700 Do you have thoughts on it, Alan?

02:47:05.980 I'm, you know, I'm opposed to it squared, whatever your, whatever your stance opposing it is, you know, I don't, you know how about technology, I think it separates us from the divine.

02:47:22.440 And so now at the same time, I, you know, I certainly would have, you know, like I could see an AI introductory explanatory, you know, have like the Saxon warrior, you know, take you from the migration period up to.

02:47:52.440 the conversion or something like that, but just as a historical and basic introduction to the

02:47:58.360 practice, not go to the end. If that's what he means, which I think that's probably what we're

02:48:03.720 talking about, I would think that that would be tolerable. I think an AI librarian makes a lot of

02:48:11.560 sense. I think beyond that is not the case. But the next question, can I bring my homie Jamal to

02:48:20.440 an event so my initial response is is going to be no um the strange thing that's unfortunate

02:48:29.800 and i realize the question as it's phrased is obviously silly but there's a because i see

02:48:36.360 applications that come through there's a surprising amount of uh children and young

02:48:42.600 people coming up in the world today whose parents have made really unfortunate choices with their

02:48:48.440 naming there's a lot of yes named after and so we both we both made an assumption about 0.99

02:49:00.200 if if your homie jamal is not a caucasian person then no he's not welcome to come to

02:49:07.320 our events we're in ethnic faith he is ill-named like some little white girls i've known who were

02:49:15.080 named kenya um trying to think there's a number of examples of people that have been given

02:49:24.200 ethnically leading names that are not indicative of their genetic ethnicities um

02:49:33.480 yeah that's unfortunate but no if uh if your homie jamal is appropriately named um they have

02:49:41.160 plenty of their own events they can go to that are not as a true events

02:49:47.800 ah what are the afa beliefs regarding deus potter i'm curious

02:50:00.440 go ahead all right so this is a question of directionality

02:50:06.760 when i answer some of these questions much like the jamal question i assume things going into it

02:50:14.500 and if it misrepresents where you're coming from with the question i apologize i understand

02:50:20.160 understand there is a concept of sky father in arian european you know pantheons

02:50:28.340 i find myself when this comes up having a discrepancy with the directionality of it

02:50:44.360 when we assume roles of divinity through scholastic study of commonalities

02:50:53.240 there must be a sky father and an earth mother and a striker and this is this dumazillion function

02:50:59.920 and this other thing we get we miss the point our gods are not beholden to anthropological

02:51:08.840 sociological constructs of how scholars have decided to partition divinity our gods exist

02:51:18.240 and are the gods of our folk all of those other things are us as people trying our best

02:51:25.520 in the best of circumstance to better understand divinity and not an external thing divinity is

02:51:34.000 focused on um with in the norse pantheon of you know nomenclature of our gods

02:51:48.240 who fills the role of sky father it i don't think it works that way i don't think that any of the

02:51:57.120 pantheons of our folk are quite that simple we have a number of gods that function in what would

02:52:05.920 traditionally be defined as that role but again they're under no obligation to meet

02:52:13.840 theories of where the gods fit uh as far as our gods with sky functions i think you can find

02:52:27.880 deus pater associations with thor with tear and with odin i think you find a lot more nuance

02:52:41.000 in that because i think sometimes the god represents or is manifested in the rage of

02:52:49.980 storms sometimes in the the mystery of the night sky sometimes in the brilliance of the day sky

02:52:56.300 and i think it is much more complex than the theory that produces that means if we're talking

02:53:06.760 about authority as, you know, as ruler of the gods. The Allfather Odin is the king of our gods

02:53:13.620 and the ruler of the Aesir. But again, it has to go with the exact function you want under that

02:53:21.500 because there's a number of associations with Deus Pater that look different depending on what

02:53:29.080 context you want to put that in. Yeah, and it's too, and I think as that standalone concept,

02:53:35.180 it's too limiting for, you know, I wish Austria were that simple, you know, that it was this and

02:53:44.700 not that, but it's complicated. Well, it is, and there's a reductionism in scholastic circles

02:53:52.480 because it makes it easier, and it makes it more linear and easier to follow, and if you're building

02:53:57.560 it from the ground up that makes a lot of sense if you are trying to build it from asgard down

02:54:06.840 it is much harder because you're trying to reach up to something beyond your understanding and get

02:54:13.840 your best best avenues of wisdom towards it knowing that you won't ever have perfection

02:54:21.560 certainly this side of the veil of understanding the entire depth and breadth of it

02:54:26.260 but yeah there's a lot to it certainly and there's a tendency to reduce everything to

02:54:34.900 sky father and earth mother and then the wiccans reduce that further to sky father having to come

02:54:44.260 from earth mother so it's all really the primal goddess we always reduce things down to where it

02:54:50.580 ends up becoming a monotheism um and it's it's much more complex than that and each of our gods

02:54:59.380 are real and exist and exist as personality with agency and to reduce that or to not

02:55:07.860 appreciate that in its full scope we can't we can't nearly as effectively

02:55:13.780 engage in the gift cycle with each of those gods.

02:55:20.140 Aside from the gods,

02:55:22.260 what does Auster Truth think about the pantheon of other

02:55:25.800 creatures, like giants, trolls, etc.?

02:55:29.640 Alan, what are your thoughts on that?

02:55:34.460 I think that the rest of the subtle

02:55:37.900 realm exists. Freyr is the

02:55:42.020 God of the Alphar, among other things.

02:55:46.120 And

02:55:46.180 I

02:55:50.660 I think that as your practice becomes

02:55:57.120 more complex and more

02:56:00.720 nuanced, you can commune

02:56:04.720 and I don't mean any kind of direct way, like

02:56:07.100 but I think you can associate

02:56:10.720 with the, you know, those beings. 1.00

02:56:14.180 We certainly give offerings to the land whites, 1.00

02:56:17.560 you know, the house trolls, 1.00

02:56:21.720 the, you know, the, those sorts of beings

02:56:24.640 can clear a path for you

02:56:27.940 or they can impede your progress.

02:56:31.040 They're, you know, they're

02:56:33.160 in that same nuance playing with the other ethereal beings,

02:56:38.240 but i but i believe in their existence if that's the question so we run into a fallacy of language

02:56:46.880 to where when we talk about all those different things the terms used in the lore have a lot of

02:56:56.400 overlap alfar means spirit or you know like

02:57:10.160 i'm trying to think of the closest cognate but it means elf in the sense of what you think when

02:57:16.640 you think of an elf but it also means ascended ancestor it also means a spirit that occupies a

02:57:23.200 place. There's a lot of subtle distinction between versions of

02:57:29.080 those things. There are light out far and smart how far and

02:57:35.200 dark out far, there are all these different little little

02:57:40.240 things. And I think that you can drive yourself insane trying to

02:57:43.000 find the nuance of all of it.

02:57:46.440 There are many things that exist beyond our

02:57:53.200 perception or our normal perception that affect the world that we live in,

02:58:00.760 in the cosmos and the metaphysics of things beyond the veil.

02:58:06.880 We attach names to those things,

02:58:11.680 oftentimes by what they do in our,

02:58:16.720 you know,

02:58:17.040 limited way to know them.

02:58:18.720 the simple answer in the fundamental is yes those things exist and we understand that they exist

02:58:25.960 as far as how to deal with them yotnar and trolls are typically again we've talked about it on the

02:58:36.880 show when we talk about giants or yotnar there are really different distinctions there there are very

02:58:43.920 ancient primal things that exist without consciousness that just kind of go into

02:58:51.640 chaotic primal nature there are vastly wise ancient forces that are storehouses of wisdom

02:59:01.560 and magic and whatever else and then there are churlish you know things with clubs and figuring

02:59:13.920 what what they're being used for but the bigger truth of that with trolls and jotnar is there are

02:59:19.040 negative and malevolent forces of chaos that exist in the spiritual realm that wish us harm

02:59:25.920 we do well to take note of those and and be cautious of that kind of association

02:59:34.560 there are other things in a positive sense in the spiritual realm that we take note of

02:59:41.600 and we want to have a beneficial relationship uh we often refer to these as whites

02:59:48.400 uh spelled differently but basically meaning spirits there are spirits of the land there

02:59:54.080 are spirits of the house there are spiritual forces that occupy the world around us and wanting

02:59:59.840 to maintain good relationships with the environment we are in and acknowledge

03:00:08.800 spiritual entities when we're able to perceive them is a is a positive thing we can go into a

03:00:16.400 lot of depths about you know how that manifests or whatever else but yes we believe those things

03:00:23.120 exist on the spiritual plane it as you know chaotic malevolent entities as you know unconscious

03:00:32.960 forces of degeneration as conscious you know ascended ancestors as other spirits of place and

03:00:42.580 of the natural world those things exist and parsing them out is a very complex thing that

03:00:47.760 requires really specific questions um how do you know when you're ready to be engaged

03:00:56.100 and the follow-up to be married.

03:01:00.320 Alan, how do you know when you're ready to get engaged and be married?

03:01:13.440 It's like a lot, you know, you just know.

03:01:15.700 I mean, and I think actually one of the troubling things that we all sort of face is, you know,

03:01:24.860 You never know when you're ready. And so if you overanalyze that question, you know, you're never going to be as ready as you might think that you should be in some hypothetical ideal, ideal universe.

03:01:39.580 Um, but the, you know, you're, you just, at some point, you know, you make your preparation, you take the leap, um, the, uh, so, and, you know, so there's no easy answer to that question.

03:02:03.560 I think, you know, if you know somebody pretty well and they jibe up with your, you know, all your belief system like we've talked about, then then you're ready.

03:02:26.980 This is the trouble with a lot of these questions.

03:02:29.080 i know as an audience you'd be much more satisfied if we had very very clear answers

03:02:33.960 on everything i don't think that's how it works on a lot of things there is

03:02:44.680 there are competing tendencies there's the just fall madly in love and get married in the first

03:02:50.920 week you meet somebody and there's wait endlessly for perfect and find out perfect never comes and

03:03:01.560 you've been you know in a live-in relationship with somebody for 30 years and you never actually

03:03:10.360 get married um you will never be in the it will never be the perfect time to get engaged to get

03:03:19.880 married you will never be perfectly satisfied or perfectly able to trust every outcome

03:03:28.740 and to plan towards that is unrealistic you have in your mind a core threshold of trust

03:03:39.940 of consistency of have you guys spoken about the things that are meaningful in your lives

03:03:46.920 about your future about children about religion about all the things that matter have you guys

03:03:54.040 talked about that and are you close enough in agreement that you're okay with where those

03:03:59.160 discussions have led you um i would advise you know don't rush in to things quickly i think that

03:04:10.440 giving things a long enough time to where you have to you know deal with imperfect situations

03:04:22.120 and struggles in your life first a little bit is very meaningful because we often show very

03:04:27.880 different sides of ourselves when we're pressure tested that said i don't advise that you

03:04:33.720 you cynically arrange to press pressure test a potential spouse why not cynically but i mean

03:04:42.900 you could uncynically i think that

03:04:46.800 if you create situations that you manufacture

03:04:54.820 to test them i think it builds in a baked in resentment or an anger and it can easily go bad

03:05:03.360 if you find like so what is an uncynical test is like have them around your friends and see how

03:05:10.440 they interact you know get them around the people that you do stuff with and see if they can you know

03:05:16.620 deal with those things be open and honest with them about who you are and what you like and what

03:05:23.680 you do and see if they feel the same way about you know every day sitting around in your pajamas

03:05:33.320 in your, you know, recliner you as they do on the you that puts on their best foot forward

03:05:40.040 on a date. You know, I think that those things all really matter. I think that coming up

03:05:45.960 with contrived like stuff to sum up in strange things is going to build a distrust if it's

03:05:52.660 not done very carefully. But yeah, have wisdom in the choice that you make. And what I would

03:06:03.180 advise is that you wait until the initial lust of a brand new relationship tempers a little bit.

03:06:15.780 You know, how, how long should you wait? I don't know. Getting married the first week is too soon.

03:06:23.280 Getting married the first month is too soon. There's some things that I can tell you are out

03:06:28.560 of bounds, but what that exact timeframe is for you, what I would say is don't wait based on

03:06:38.680 trying to wait for perfect. Perfect will not happen. Man, but if I wait, then I'll have enough

03:06:45.380 money to buy a ring. Man, I don't know if I could really marry right now. I don't have a good enough

03:06:50.940 job. How could I support a family? All of those kinds of things, I don't think that should prevent

03:06:57.660 you. We don't, none of us know how long we have this side of the veil. There will never be the

03:07:08.060 perfect time and there will always be a case to be made. Maybe I should wait a little bit longer

03:07:13.600 until I have this next thing. And you can wait yourself right out of having a productive and

03:07:19.940 meaningful life. So don't do that. But do give it some time to

03:07:26.200 let the realities sink in. And to make a choice based on your

03:07:31.720 feelings, certainly, but also tempered by sober reasoning.

03:07:42.620 Ah, and I appreciate the question. I think it's a good

03:07:45.300 question what about living together before marriage alan what are your thoughts works for me

03:08:00.500 yeah so here's one of the other realities

03:08:05.940 you can't just cherry pick one aspect of a bygone cultural context

03:08:13.780 and superimpose it in total upon the world that we live in i think in a different society where

03:08:23.300 that was not customary and you know there's a lot of things that can work in the right context

03:08:31.220 in today's context i would encourage people to live together before they're married

03:08:38.660 um i have i certainly did i think most people that i know have done that and gone that route

03:08:47.780 i think it's very tempting to suggest some kind of conservative level of like

03:08:58.900 chaste and i'm not even faulting this but going back to you know an earlier 20th century

03:09:05.940 preconception of of propriety on that but i don't think we have the social structure that supports

03:09:13.100 that in the same way um so yeah i mean i certainly lived with my wife before we got married i think

03:09:19.940 that's probably a good thing the things i've seen over in the chat about you get to kind of see

03:09:25.320 people when they're raw see people in their natural habitat when they're not trying to impress

03:09:31.240 be around them when they're sick and they're you know not when they're not

03:09:37.800 in an ideal environment that's been constructed when they're 0.81

03:09:46.840 there's this like feminist oh no you didn't you know if you can't you can't handle me at

03:09:51.800 my worst you don't observe me at my best well you should make an effort to not be at your worst 0.64

03:09:56.600 but there is something to be said of knowing you know where somebody's at and how they are when

03:10:03.960 times are rough and also knowing how they are when times are good those things matter so i think you

03:10:10.940 get a particular view of that when you do live together for an amount of time

03:10:16.060 ah what does us true consider is wrong with people that are just demons

03:10:26.900 some of our politicians seemed purely evil some regular people too

03:10:33.780 it's a good question alan what are your thoughts on that

03:10:39.140 in the long long time ago um

03:10:45.940 in a moot far away the uh i had a discussion with a good friend of mine um and we talked about

03:10:54.820 That topic. First of all, I think it does go back to the idea of, you know, the evil influences that, you know, that in this in the exact same way that there are good spiritual influences or positive spiritual energies out there.

03:11:19.260 There are negative spiritual energies, and I think they can infect people in a subtle way.

03:11:29.580 I think for the most part, though, it seems to me that people that we think of as evil are really just people who make bad decisions.

03:11:43.680 You know, they're not infected with a demon. 1.00

03:11:46.740 They're just assholes. 1.00

03:11:49.260 And I realize it can go beyond that. And I certainly, you know, I've had on, I wish I could remember the name of the guy who made the glasses. I've been on this trend about They Live, you know, Roddy Piper movie where you have the sunglasses and you can see the demons that live in people. 1.00

03:12:09.880 and i certainly think that there are some few actual demons out there that

03:12:17.620 are skinwalkers that's certainly supported by the lore

03:12:21.760 um i think other types of soul sickness result from some sort of incomplete ensoulment

03:12:31.480 um where the soul for whatever reason or maybe not all of the soul complex we are nine parts you

03:12:38.660 You know, all the soul complex does not attach completely and elegantly to the to the new life.

03:12:49.540 And so I think that, first of all, you know, that accounts for some sorts of disabilities.

03:12:58.980 I think it also would leave a door open for some sort of actual evil entity to enter in and maintain or at least, you know, have more influence over that person than they would over some different person.

03:13:17.880 And what I have come to understand is that those sorts of things are so subtle and complex, it's just really, we can only understand that realm in a very minimal way.

03:13:34.140 I think those I think there are evil influences. I think those who are not properly cyclically prepared can fall prey to all sorts of demons, you know, the demon of the worship of money and many others.

03:13:56.220 And so, yes, those those evil influences are out there. And that's one of the reasons that you need a good, strong cadre of good people around you to fend that sort of thing off.

03:14:09.380 um so what Alan said certain so certainly all of those things um there are

03:14:24.740 there are bad spiritual entities out there that can influence people in bad ways and in the worst

03:14:33.800 scenario perhaps manifest or take over somebody or they're somehow troll possessed

03:14:43.480 but i think that's an easy out and i think that's highly overused i think the devil

03:14:49.880 made me do it is highly highly overused there are a lot of people that are just bad people

03:14:58.360 and one of the things that you see with bad people and you use the politicians as an example

03:15:03.800 something happens where it's we have a tremendous ability to justify our actions

03:15:14.360 there is a psychological function in people that very few people think they're doing anything or

03:15:26.320 okay very few people rationalize that they are doing evil things now there are certain

03:15:33.560 people that are sociopaths that are overtly sadistic you see you know people that torture

03:15:41.080 children or torture animals or serial killers there's people that are just genuinely evil

03:15:49.080 out the gate they're evil on purpose they're evil because either they are the subject of some kind

03:15:55.000 of horrible spiritual possession or they're just very damaged and broken soul component people

03:16:06.920 but there's a lot of other people that do bad things and justify them a lot

03:16:13.480 and i'm going on your thing asking about politicians and other people that just seem evil

03:16:18.440 every time you do stuff that you know is wrong and you have to do little mental gymnastics to

03:16:29.380 justify it and make it okay you make it a little bit harder at the next junction to say hey

03:16:38.120 this is bad i shouldn't do this if you do if you're living wrong for a year

03:16:46.760 you have to, in order to correct yourself, acknowledge like, man, I've spent this last

03:16:53.300 year being a really bad person. I've hurt a lot of people. I should fix that and get right.

03:16:59.600 That's hard to do. It's very hard for us to admit that to ourselves. There's something called the

03:17:06.640 sunk cost fallacy. Once you've invested a certain number of years into things in your life,

03:17:12.020 you have an option at some point of whether you lean into realizing that you're living wrong and

03:17:21.880 try to correct yourself or you double down you let it ride like no i'm not living wrong this is

03:17:28.200 the way i'm supposed to live and you keep going and it's easier to avoid the psychological trauma

03:17:35.280 of reconciling the damage that you've caused

03:17:39.400 and the wrong that you've done

03:17:40.580 by continuing to lean into the delusion

03:17:44.260 that there's nothing wrong with what you're doing

03:17:46.560 and to keep living wrong.

03:17:49.060 You mentioned politicians.

03:17:51.800 In the way that our system works currently,

03:17:54.400 and perhaps in political situations historically,

03:17:59.900 if you are one of the political figures

03:18:04.540 that endlessly compromises core value for personal gain or for maintaining your position or whatever

03:18:12.380 you do, there comes a point where you, and this may seem like a really convoluted answer to your

03:18:20.840 question. This is something that I see with age. And a lot of the politicians, you find these

03:18:27.900 90-year-old, 80-something-year-old individuals that have been senators for the last 60 years.

03:18:35.600 They've never known a life where they weren't in that spot. The more you're into that, the more

03:18:41.080 you make whatever compromises you need to do to stay in that spot, and the more you invest

03:18:47.340 personally into justifying that. Can you imagine if you spent 90 years, or shoot, if you spent 80

03:18:56.420 years of your life wrong and living poorly and then you have to come to the realization of man

03:19:06.560 I am a terrible person I should fix this with that much of the time already through the hourglass 0.99

03:19:14.080 that's really traumatic in a less evil oriented way we see that a lot with older people 0.98

03:19:22.320 as far as, you know, we see that, okay, in recent times, a great many people have become

03:19:31.080 disabused of being able to trust their government, to trust their media, to trust a lot of things

03:19:37.080 that were traditionally trusted. And I, you know, I faced some of this in my own life with my father

03:19:43.800 and my stepmother and people of that generation where they've been part of a system that's been

03:19:50.380 lying to us for a really really really long time and the blow of like wow i've been hoodwinked for

03:20:00.540 you know my entire adult life i should radically rethink my value system and my you know all of

03:20:11.260 these core values that's a crushing blow that a lot of people don't know how to survive and don't

03:20:17.900 know how to manage so they double down and they choose not to see things that are obvious because

03:20:23.820 the other is just unacceptable if you're somebody who has just sold your soul to be in your political

03:20:28.780 spot for all of these years and at some point you're like man maybe i'm living wrong

03:20:36.380 i mean that's that's more than a lot of people can test i would say that's more than most people can

03:20:42.700 take. So you lean into the bad behavior and you placate yourself with, you know, sensory benefits

03:20:50.860 or just mental justifications or whatever you can do, but facing the reality of needing to

03:20:57.100 fundamentally change the lifestyle you've chosen to lead is increasingly harder the longer that

03:21:02.700 you're in a bad lifestyle. And yeah, I think that's what we see. I think we see people that

03:21:10.280 have habituated decades of their life to misbehavior and immorality, and they simply

03:21:18.160 don't have the strength of character to fix themselves, so they double down on poor choices

03:21:24.480 and on villainy. I think there's probably a lot of other explanations, but that's the

03:21:30.840 one that I see. Could you share with us your informative perspective on the Germanic existential

03:21:44.120 origin story? I know there's Musfil, Niflheim, Ymir, and Adamla, but I feel I'm missing something.

03:21:57.620 there must be more. I'm trying to read whether, okay, I think it's, okay, he has another question,

03:22:07.180 but I think it's a completely separate question. Alan, how would you approach that?

03:22:12.140 Well, this is something I actually emailed one of the non-AFA authors about, and

03:22:21.120 corresponded with her a bit on, um, you know, on that idea. Um, first,

03:22:35.120 you know, I think it's important. It seems to me that it, that, that it's,

03:22:41.400 it's the way I understand it. And this is, I wouldn't say this is AFA, um, dogma,

03:22:48.400 But the way I understand it is that the story of Amir, because it goes back to beyond the origin, it's one of those things that's like what happened before the Big Bang.

03:23:03.200 And so it's just a way of trying to understand why there is something rather than nothing.

03:23:10.980 But the story of Amir, mainly because the struggle that I had with it is what the story portrays is that Wotan, Wotanaz, is not the original being.

03:23:36.400 um but what that um but so at the same time then the but the way that it to me co-ops the story

03:23:50.180 is that there was this primordial somethingness and Wotan shaped it in a way

03:24:05.080 that gave life and being to the folk.

03:24:15.940 And so that's how it all comes together for me.

03:24:20.760 You know, like, was there a literal giant

03:24:23.160 who was killed by his children

03:24:26.160 and, you know, after being lapped into existence

03:24:30.520 by the primordial cow?

03:24:35.080 Maybe. But I don't think that, you know, I wouldn't treat that as a totem of faith. That's a way to understand it. I think the more important part is to see the part where the forces of order come in to shape this plasma, if that's the word that you want to use, into something that we the folk can live and enjoy.

03:25:05.080 So, there's something to be said when examining our lore generally, is what is the purpose of it?

03:25:22.000 and I think that the scientific development of the earth

03:25:34.660 is much much less important to our ancestors as is setting the spiritual stage for the reality

03:25:46.080 that we exist in and then positioning and orienting ourselves within that

03:25:54.240 within that stage that we find ourselves in within that you know understanding of our

03:26:01.560 surroundings so providing us with a setting and with a fundamental impetus of who we are

03:26:08.480 and where we come from and i think that's spoken to by our lore in a very profound way

03:26:15.040 In the beginning, you see an undifferentiated yawning void that's pregnant with potentiality.

03:26:29.220 You see these very primal cosmic existing things that are fundamentally chaotic.

03:26:43.860 You see Emir as the primal giant of chaos, but you see with the emergence of Odin, and importantly, his brothers, Vili and Vey, so you see the god of, you know, ecstatic inspiration, coupled with literally will and sacrality.

03:27:13.860 destroying the primal chaotic giant taking chaos breaking it down and shaping our ordered existence 0.51

03:27:28.980 from that chaos

03:27:33.140 you see them build the world build the the more importantly build the world that we exist within

03:27:41.700 from the elements of this chaotic primordial primordial giants they are ordering chaos

03:27:50.340 through inspiration through will and through sacrality and then you have those same three gods

03:27:59.400 find two pre-existing things on a seashore they're described as you know pieces of driftwood

03:28:11.700 And from these things that were adrift, that didn't have fate, that didn't have personhood, that didn't have that divine spark, that didn't have the life force that makes humans a whole separate order of things than other creatures we find around ourselves.

03:28:33.040 they found those things and they imbued them with gifts with uh with fate they imbued them

03:28:47.540 with inspiration they imbued them with you know life force and they created from something that

03:28:56.160 existed, they evolved that, they made that ascend into something that is. They took these

03:29:03.580 undifferentiated, unfaded logs and made them into the very first Aryan man and woman 0.88

03:29:10.240 and imparted those fundamental spark of life, of animation, of goodly hue and the blood that

03:29:19.340 flows within our veins they set that in motion and we carry a piece of that with us today

03:29:25.780 inherited from our most ancient grandparents and i think those are some of the fundamental truths

03:29:32.380 to that story um i would direct you to other episodes of vns where we talk about how it

03:29:41.700 is displayed in the lore and there's a lot of times that we talk about that any particular

03:29:47.880 question you have on it, because it's nuanced. There's a lot of depth to a lot of it. But those

03:29:52.680 are some of the very fundamental pieces of our creation story that I think are particularly

03:29:58.580 relevant to our existence and to Ausitru. We have a number of other little things going on here.

03:30:12.160 Could you share with us?

03:30:13.900 Okay, no, I already got that.

03:30:15.440 All right.

03:30:15.860 So Jordan Peterson.

03:30:18.660 Go ahead.

03:30:19.920 Sorry, last one.

03:30:21.420 No, I got caught in the morning.

03:30:22.760 So this is the last one.

03:30:28.860 All right.

03:30:29.400 It is the last one.

03:30:30.280 It's the last one in our queue.

03:30:31.220 It's what we've got.

03:30:31.920 So Jordan Peterson has been saying that individuals who believe in multiple gods have fractured psyches.

03:30:37.940 is the absence of a unifying force and our psyches in the absence of a unifying force

03:30:46.440 and are susceptible to depression, anxiety, etc.

03:30:50.920 Thoughts?

03:30:52.580 He's wrong.

03:30:55.460 Yes.

03:30:56.420 About that.

03:30:57.440 You know, he's wrong about that.

03:31:02.240 If that were a correct statement, there would be no Christians who are depressed.

03:31:08.820 so jordan peterson is also less than honest about his faith

03:31:16.260 i have read things by him and i've also listened to him in a number of interview contexts and he's

03:31:23.140 always very uncomfortable talking about religion in terms of actual devotional religious practice

03:31:31.380 he's brilliant in finding analogy in Bible stories and I think he does a masterful job

03:31:42.360 of imbuing those with lessons and with sense and with you know really plausible and interesting

03:31:51.480 you know meta narratives but he doesn't talk about his devotion to Jehovah and his love for

03:31:59.340 Jesus. And I think he is fundamentally religious in an archetypal, abstract, ultimately atheistic

03:32:11.100 sense. And I think he is much less comfortable embracing his religiosity in a overtly devotional,

03:32:22.500 personal, you know, Jesus is my Lord and Savior and Jehovah is God the Father and I love him and

03:32:30.680 worship him. You never hear Jordan Peterson talk in that way. And maybe he does privately and

03:32:37.760 just isn't comfortable expressing that publicly. Maybe he's in the midst of spiritual evolution

03:32:43.880 that way. I always get the sense when he speaks that he is in a process of learning and growing

03:32:48.960 that way but yeah if the gods are just psychological constructs then i see his preference for the unity

03:33:01.600 that comes in a monotheistic unifying psychological construct than in multiple conflicting archetypical

03:33:12.320 forces, but that's not what we're dealing with. We're dealing with gods.

03:33:18.920 And your own will is that unifying force. Your own, you know, your own ensolement is the way of

03:33:27.900 navigating through these waters. Yes. And it's much less comfortable when you have agency

03:33:35.520 and you are responsible for making choices when you are responsible for being the hero or the

03:33:44.860 villain on your own and not because it's the will of God or because the devil made you do it,

03:33:52.880 but because you are choosing to live nobly or ignobly and being judged by our gods.

03:33:58.660 um no i think that jordan peterson like i said he looks at the gods in a psychological

03:34:09.000 archetypical sense i do think i was following a little bit of the chat i do think he follows

03:34:14.920 you know young in that sense but again that's fundamentally misunderstanding that's cut and

03:34:23.340 what i'll say is that is a step away from just casual atheism but oftentimes when you have

03:34:34.460 educated people that come from a non-religious background they have to somehow try to

03:34:43.260 they're in an uncomfortable spot where they want to make religion fit into what they perceive as

03:34:49.980 reality and so they attempt to drag the gods down to them so that they can understand better

03:34:58.140 as opposed to elevating them towards the gods and reaching up trying to grasp them in a closer way

03:35:05.500 so yeah i think he's confused um our gods exist my mental state doesn't affect their existence

03:35:15.200 Right. And I and I think your analysis is spot on, which is especially ironic because I heard him talking on Joe Rogan about practicing kundalini yoga.

03:35:28.400 So, you know, those that seems to be inherently contradictory.

03:35:34.080 Well, it's one of those things. He'll science it out.

03:35:37.760 You know, yeah, there's there's this breath and he'll talk about all the physiological things,

03:35:42.060 but he doesn't talk about the spiritual ascension of of the fire serpent he talks about

03:35:48.940 the science because that's his comfort zone and he's educated in that he is a professional

03:35:53.340 in that field that's where he is comfortable um but no i think he's you know i don't think

03:36:02.380 he is simply inaccurate in that assessment and i think it often comes from a very uninformed

03:36:08.620 um space you know i'm i'm i would be very curious how much jordan peterson knows about

03:36:18.060 certainly about house a true i think that he you know

03:36:23.260 i think we ought to look him up and have a conversation with him i would love that i would

03:36:27.100 love to have a conversation with jordan peterson that would be fantastic honestly i think he'd be

03:36:32.140 a fascinating guy to talk with to have a beer with to have dinner with or to have you know any kind of

03:36:38.620 of, you know, on here kind of discourse with.

03:36:42.040 He's got other things he's doing, I'm sure,

03:36:45.180 but that would be, I think he'd be a fascinating guy.

03:36:47.440 What could be better than this?

03:36:49.100 And he seemed, that's a fine question, Alan.

03:36:51.860 There's things with more viewership,

03:36:53.700 you know, better, I think that's in the eye of the beholder.

03:36:57.940 But yeah, Dr. Peterson would like to be on the program,

03:37:01.420 he should contact me and we can make something happen.

03:37:04.780 Shoot, he can come over and have dinner

03:37:06.360 and I'll share some Chianti with him.

03:37:08.620 uh that said send your bottle of meat if he comes there you go that's the last question we have for

03:37:15.820 this evening uh alan thank you so much for joining us once again and giving us your your perspective

03:37:23.580 on these things and sharing your wisdom with our audience um you know you're you're one of my

03:37:30.580 closest friends and it's always good to get a chance to sit and talk with you and hopefully

03:37:35.080 it's been beneficial to all of you guys out there joining us this evening.

03:37:41.440 Any preview of what next month's Adulting with Alan might hold for us?

03:37:50.760 Nope.

03:37:52.140 All right.

03:37:53.160 We will have to wait in suspense with bated breath until the next exciting edition of

03:37:58.700 Adulting with Alan.

03:37:59.560 In the meantime, next week, Svon and I will join you again for part six of our Vulsonga Saga series.

03:38:12.340 Thank you guys so much for your generosity, for sticking with us, for your questions, for your participation, for all you add to what we're doing.

03:38:22.580 We're living in a really special time.

03:38:24.520 If you're hearing this, tell other folks that might benefit from this.

03:38:31.840 Send them here.

03:38:32.860 Word of mouth helps.

03:38:34.520 And if you are a heterosexual white person that is listening to this,

03:38:40.180 consider joining the Ask True Folk Assembly.

03:38:42.360 We're doing amazing things.

03:38:44.280 We would love to have you with us as we move victoriously into the future.

03:38:49.980 Hail the folk.

03:38:51.060 Hail the folk.

03:38:51.780 Till next week, hail the Iseer, hail the folk, hail the AFA, and remember, victory never sleeps.

03:39:21.780 We'll be right back.

03:39:51.780 Thank you.

03:40:21.780 Thank you.

03:40:51.780 Thank you.

03:41:21.780 Thank you.

03:41:51.780 Transcription by CastingWords

Asatru Folk Assembly - May 29, 2025

5⧸28⧸25 Victory Never Sleeps, Episode 151 - Marriage and Relationships

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript