00:04:03.440I started studying Christianity probably a year or two before I converted
00:04:08.220because i was realizing okay everything's going wrong in society the christians seem to have
00:04:13.140some good ideas let me learn from them and i did and i thought a lot of the wisdom there was very
00:04:18.400good however i wasn't convinced until i i kind of had to be convinced by a how can i say this
00:04:29.080i'm not even sure if i should say this because every time i do it gets a lot of people like
00:04:33.560demoralized and trying to convert in the sense that i had a religious experience and that's what
00:04:38.500finally converted me and the reason i don't always share that is because the common response i get
00:04:44.700when i when i tell them that i have a religious experience like okay i'll convert when i have one
00:04:48.780it's like great how did you convince your friend did he have a religious experience he did not have
00:04:53.820no so very quickly i realized i can't just tell people i had a religious experience and then they
00:04:59.060didn't convert that doesn't make any damn sense but after all by the way i want to say how much
00:05:04.060i appreciate that was immediately obvious to you you do not know because i also converted from
00:05:09.720being an atheist for ages how many times a christian would just be like well you know god
00:05:15.180just started talking that's how i know and that's why you should know too and i'm like but he doesn't
00:05:20.340talk to me like what are you talking about that your personal religious experience doesn't does
00:05:26.580not impact my belief right so i really appreciate that that was obvious to you but go on yeah so
00:05:33.140like people from different religions have their own religious experience where they claim to
00:05:37.060people can also go insane and people can go temporarily insane so it did cross my mind hey
00:05:41.780maybe i just went crazy for like one morning that might have happened so i decided okay i've already
00:05:47.220been studying this religion i like the ideas let's actually go deeper into the philosophy
00:05:51.860also let's see if i can understand approve it or debunk it and this was like my fixation for one
00:05:56.100or two weeks i don't remember exactly where all i cared about doing was studying the bible i hadn't
00:06:00.980told anyone that i had converted by this point all my fixation was on just studying the bible
00:06:06.500itself learning about what theologians believed i would be listening to theology podcasts while
00:06:11.540doing everything or anything and so i ended up adopting like a mix of beliefs of different
00:06:17.540protestant denominations especially but i also respect the catholics and the orthodox
00:06:21.380i'm not militantly protestant uh yeah like we are and we have a reputation for being so
00:06:28.900but okay so that's really i find it interesting that you were able to get so much from studying
00:06:35.220theologians so i guess like this actually makes sense to go into my history on this i really
00:06:40.760enjoyed when i was an atheist christian radio and i listened to tons of christian radio but
00:06:50.080what's really funny is if you're super into christian radio which is probably not good for
00:06:55.840me i i approach this wrong you get really into arguments that are never gonna matter to an
00:07:02.340atheist conversion like pre versus post millennialism right like right that yeah yeah i know
00:07:09.860what you're talking about and i would get super into like all of the arguments on both sides of
00:07:15.800that because I just loved the lore I guess but I never came in on the more practical things that I
00:07:23.700had never had somebody sit me down and give me good arguments for actually this could be a fun
00:07:29.900thing for us to go into in this is how would you today first how did you convert your friend and
00:07:35.780how would you go to convert your younger self before the experience because there are so many
00:07:43.080tactics that i think a lot of christians seem to default to when they're attempting to convert
00:07:48.540people and they don't like it so they can do not does not pass go and i think one of the big ones
00:07:55.860that we sort of touched on is not just personal religious experiences but claiming that x group
00:08:02.100of religious people say they saw a miracle or that some miraculous thing happened in the bible0.78
00:08:07.220and then obviously your atheist is just going to be like yes but the muslim who just tried to
00:08:11.780convert me said the same thing and the buddhist who just tried to convert me said the same thing
00:08:15.540like how would you how yeah how did you crack that nut well it's tailored to each person people0.98
00:08:22.200respond to different things you asked me about how would i convert myself i think the most important
00:08:27.080thing to have done to myself when i was an atheist would be to intellectually humiliate me
00:08:31.380because i was way too prideful i every interaction i had with christians was incredibly poor so every0.98
00:08:38.920christian i've met outside of my family was to put up lightly an idiot and i had never actually0.94
00:08:45.060heard the gospel before i had become christian because every christian i ever talked to the0.98
00:08:49.620only thing they cared about was debating evolution and they had very poor arguments to debate
00:08:55.080evolution was the issue so that was my sole experience of christians outside my family
00:09:00.220and it was not very convincing and so every time i had one of those experiences i became even more0.99
00:09:06.140prideful in my beliefs because i was like well this is what these idiots believe i'm not an idiot0.95
00:09:11.620like them now it depends of course of certain people i've had people where you could use0.99
00:09:17.500whatever logic you wanted it wouldn't work but if you play the right song then then you have some
00:09:22.760effect which is why i also criticize contemporary churches so much of their hip-hop nonsense where
00:09:29.300they're just making an inferior version of modern music and like that's not going to reach the people
00:09:33.360we're trying to reach with christian music it's actually funny that you mention songs is having
00:09:39.260an impact on people's beliefs because one thing that's become very popular in our wider community
00:09:46.280recently and i don't know how tapped into this you are are you tapped into stuff like the sky
00:09:51.720browse cinematic universe and like all the conservative ai music that's being generated
00:09:55.960these days i've heard that there's been some ai music generated especially from like conservative
00:10:01.060and religious angles i've never seen it or heard it oh i'll send you i'm so into it because what
00:10:06.360they do is they collect different conservative influencers and they have them as like figures in
00:10:10.620it or some of them just do their own like things but i remember really having my mind changed
00:10:16.640because of one of the songs and it was mostly just because it made me feel culturally normal
00:10:22.780to have this point and it's leaflet song about college being a scam oh i had felt that college
00:10:28.960was a scam for a while i had felt like the math just doesn't add up but for whatever reason hearing
00:10:34.520it in a song i just walked away being like wait that's so obvious now why was i why was i over
00:10:42.200intellectualizing it but i think you probably mean even in the context of like music that that is
00:10:46.780transcending for people like a lot of people in you go to like a roman mass or you go to evening
00:10:52.720song and even that is so uh impactful to an individual they can have a religious like
00:10:58.500experience is that more what you're thinking or yeah yeah it's along those lines one thing i'm
00:11:03.880curious based based on that actually is you're you're sort of talking about people's standard
00:11:08.100of evidence right for one person their standard of evidence may be a logical argument for another
00:11:12.720person it may be a religious experience or an ex a very emotional experience like i listened to a
00:11:19.640song and it made me feel a certain way and therefore this thing must be right do you try
00:11:23.980to create arguments that are designed for different standards of evidence like emotion or logic or
00:11:31.120personal experience or studies or other things or do you just kind of try to hit the most commonly
00:11:37.560encountered arguments like what's your approach to presenting information since i was an atheist
00:11:43.180i pretty much know the atheist arguments and even further context i grew up as an atheist but my
00:11:49.400family and i had to leave our home countries and go to a muslim country for a while for work
00:11:53.400and i really did not like islam so i was very into like anti-theist apologetics
00:11:59.440so i i had plenty of experience on that so that i never put focus on that because it's second
00:12:06.900nature by this point and then as for focusing on on like particular arguments i know what would
00:12:12.940work on me i like the rationalist arguments but the truth is not everyone thinks
00:12:18.480so this this goes beyond just religion it goes on to politics and the likes a lot of people who
00:12:25.040are more intellectually inclined like rational arguments and the likes they assume everyone
00:12:29.900thinks like a 130 iq european and that is just not reality it's even the reason why i dropped
00:12:37.840my libertarian leanings because i realized this this would work fantastic if everyone was a
00:12:42.920130 iq european yeah yeah but that's not the world we live in and so some things have to be adapted
00:12:49.380it's also why i took like a lot of stronger stance against usury for example because previously i0.93
00:12:56.120would think just don't be stupid don't sign this ridiculous contract with an insane interest rate0.99
00:13:00.480it's like okay well some people are stupid does that mean that we have the right to use the1.00
00:13:04.660government to force them into being de facto slaves no and if people are offended by his take0.99
00:13:11.980on mentioning european in this particular context i would strongly point you to our episode on why
00:13:18.720arab countries are almost never democracies where we point out that for like centuries almost no
00:13:25.500arab country has ever been a lasting democracy and almost every northern european country has0.95
00:13:30.020and so for whatever reason and you you can you can have a thousand different reasons why this
00:13:36.500may be the case different populations and somebody could be like oh that's muslim culture but then we
00:13:40.860point out in non-Arab Muslim cultures, it's not infrequent that they have democracies. So you
00:13:46.780could say, well, in some groups, in some cultures, things just operate differently and different
00:13:51.640types of societal structures work at different levels. And this is one of the big problems that
00:13:57.020I think that we're having in Europe and the Americas right now is we are importing a lot of0.99
00:14:01.960people that seem to operate very well under systems that look nothing like our system.
00:14:09.920Like, if you go to the Middle East, there's a number of countries that are clean and operate pretty well, but they are the least democratic of the states, like the UAE and Saudi Arabia and Qatar, whereas the most democratic of the states are often the most dangerous and least well managed.
00:14:28.220So, you know, I just think that's a good point there.
00:14:37.400Okay. And were you always conservative? Or was that something that sort of happened to you over time or through cultural battles or whatever? Yeah.
00:14:45.420I think the closest I've ever been to not being conservative was when I was like six or seven and I heard my uncle lost his job. And I was like, how could a company fire someone? It ruins their life. And that was the closest I've ever come to being a leftist.
00:15:01.460that moment on like from eight years old onwards i was pretty dead set on on right wing even though
00:15:08.560for a large portion i didn't really understand it by the time i was in high school it was just
00:15:13.880straight up like daily wire talking points for me and then it took like a couple more years for me
00:15:18.900to go out of that and realize okay daily wire is perhaps not the answer to everything
00:15:24.220oh that's actually an interesting point and i'd love to hear your thoughts on this is
00:15:28.800the wider cultural change in modern conservatism that we've seen, where the boomer conservatism,
00:15:36.760which ironically, you know, I think the Daily Wire is one of the perfect avatars of,0.71
00:15:41.400despite Ben Shapiro being, you know, younger, he sort of got captured by boomers when he was a kid
00:15:46.360and he's never been able to state that mindset. Where boomer conservatism is really sort of dying
00:15:52.760out as an intellectual philosophy and this entirely new type or flavor of conservatism
00:16:00.820is beginning to replace it and what are your thoughts on that as you've seen this happen or
00:16:06.020yeah oh yeah oh definitely and it's been extremely beneficial like people i had met early on that
00:16:11.840were diehard leftists when they realized that the right wasn't just boomer conservatism have
00:16:17.300started now going more to the center more to the right boomer conservatism is just so fake1.00
00:16:22.560they conserve nothing you they they suck they suck one of the statistics that i was watching0.99
00:16:28.980recently we went over an episode that hasn't gone live yet is we were looking at pro-muslim sentiment1.00
00:16:35.240in the united states a lot of people are aware of this it jumped up after 9-11 what people are
00:16:41.280unaware of is that the demographic it jumped up most within were very conservative people
00:16:47.820very conservative republicans whereas if you look at the new generation of conservative after the
00:16:52.960october 11th attacks pro-palestine sentiment jumped up among leftists but it didn't go up at
00:16:58.420all among conservatives like we're not falling for this nonsense anymore where it's like oh no
00:17:03.160victim blaming somebody might be mad at muslims because one group of muslims did something
00:17:07.600yeah i agree with you that i think one of the traps that we were taught growing up especially
00:17:16.360by daily wire types is that you had to be on team israel or you had to be on team palestine
00:17:21.320and my my personal experience is obviously excluding the innocence on both sides both0.63
00:17:27.420sides suck like both sides are really really bad and i'm not sure which one i hate more
00:17:32.860and i if it was possible for two sides to lose a war i would like them both to lose0.99
00:17:38.620that would be my position that's definitely well i mean that's definitely a sentiment
00:17:43.800that's shared among a lot of people i it's it's not one that we share as aggressively but i mean
00:17:49.940our our basic position is we like people who are economically and technologically productive and
00:17:56.280appear to be moving civilization forwards and who also fight back when people dick with them0.63
00:18:00.940but i also understand that israel has really manipulated the united states to do things that
00:18:07.140are not in our best interest many times and so i understand the sentiment there uh i i'm wondering
00:18:14.420how you see when you moved away from like daily wire thinking was the number one thing that you
00:18:19.940moved away from was it the israel thing or were there other things about boomer conservatism you
00:18:24.740found toxic there was a lot that was talks about boomer conservatism a lot of it was things that
00:18:30.260you don't really notice early on because they seem to be like champions against woke ideology
00:18:34.980and in reality it was this false like controlled opposition where we're going to oppose woke
00:18:41.740ideology but we're going to let in gay marriage we're going to let in feminism in our churches
00:18:47.700it seemed like they were making a lot of compromises with the woke crowd so they could
00:18:52.280show how reasonable they were being and then it seemed like every couple every four years
00:18:57.480the conservative party was more liberal and now i'm assuming probably 40 years ago obviously 40
00:19:04.220years ago democrats or way more well 40 years ago liberals or way more conservative than modern
00:19:09.380conservatives and so it seemed like a controlled opposition to slowly push the overtone window
00:19:15.680over and over towards the side of insanity we did a whole episode on that like it seems to be
00:19:22.800pretty well and well people know people have done full like essays on that one thing i wanted to
00:19:27.240ask you though if i may i'm really curious about how your life has changed since you converted to
00:19:31.960christianity like and also what what does being actively christian look like to you how active
00:19:37.340are you in your like with your local church or is is your religious experience one more about
00:19:44.780heavy biblical study and prayer and less about engagement with the community because when i
00:19:49.120hear about people converting it can mean so many different things like there are people who convert
00:19:53.040without even believing anything that's not you you're very different but does that this mean
00:19:57.020that you're also participating in a community and your life and schedule are totally different too
00:20:00.940well a lot of things changed i really wanted to participate in the community i joined the church
00:20:06.740i did all the things to to be able to join church so the place i live i have two options
00:20:11.100i can be catholic or it can be these modern evangelical types and i i wasn't catholic i
00:20:16.980don't hold a grudge against catholics i don't think it's a bad denomination but i don't agree
00:20:20.900with it so that was off the list and then i thought okay well non-denominational i guess
00:20:26.300that will work. I'll go to a non-denominational church and we'll see how well that goes. It's
00:20:31.040a place for all Christians. It was not. It was just not. Was it like super woke or like what1.00
00:20:36.840was your take on the non-denominational? It wasn't super woke. It wasn't super woke,
00:20:40.360but it had problems. It allowed modern infections to get in very easily. It's the type of boomer
00:20:46.160conservatism that we're criticizing. They allowed feminism to get into the church. They allowed a1.00
00:20:52.060lot of other issues to get into the church the pastor only gave sermons on things that were very
00:20:58.260obviously bad in the political climate so like only we're going to talk badly about gender ideology
00:21:04.420but we're not going to talk about how the men in our church don't run the household and actually
00:21:09.480they're led by their women we're not going to talk about that so only the obvious things that
00:21:14.200everyone already agreed with nothing that could offend the congregation
00:21:18.280there was one time where i wanted to give a bible study so i was helping out some of my fellow
00:21:26.120young adults in the group i wanted to give a bible study on genesis particularly the curses of adam
00:21:31.800and eve and they were very happy for me to do the bible study on the curse of adam they were not
00:21:38.220happy with me doing the curse of eve yes and so in the end i i just got censored and it was a decision
00:21:46.240behind closed doors and they they just kept delaying they didn't even let me know that
00:21:51.040they canceled it until it was like the day prior of course i was i was planning on teach the curse
00:21:58.120of adam and eve to about 12 people when they censored me i ended up making it into a video
00:22:03.080so instead i taught it to like 120 000 so it worked out in the end well i mean i think this
00:22:09.980shows why boomer conservatism has been hit so hard and has had such a hard time reacting0.99
00:22:17.320is the mechanisms of control that they built were so petty low level and internet stupid0.99
00:22:26.160that the moment people saw around them or found a way to you know circumvent them like you did0.96
00:22:35.500the impact is so large and it's a position that young people are put in when they see the boomers
00:22:44.340and i think the feminism thing is such a great point because that reminds me of like the vague
00:22:48.940boomer conservatism that we so would have seen was like ben shapiro always trying to prop up his
00:22:53.340sister and stuff like that and like oh we need a woman's voice we need a they're still hook line
00:22:59.660and sinker swallowing oh you know you wouldn't want to say people are different because that's
00:23:04.980racist and we don't want anyone like that in our communities and it's like but they are everyone
00:23:11.120can see it but yeah i guess it's the the pushing back and i had to contextualize that and i need
00:23:18.720to think about it a little bit the thing that really changed was the shiblet list of rules
00:23:25.980of things we were supposed to pretend mattered or were important without question and the
00:23:34.360the glee with which the new right because what the new right really began to do in response to that
00:23:40.540is we began to only listen to people who we who validated themselves through showing that they're
00:23:47.820willing to push back against these arbitrary rules and you know i was on a show recently and
00:23:53.960they were like malcolm how could you have these racist looking titles and i was yeah but you
00:23:58.060watched the episode it wasn't racist right and they're like well not technically you know and
00:24:02.380it's like well okay so i need to authenticate myself as a crowd that has come to distrust
00:24:08.300people who try to play too aggressively within this very tight ruled format and i think you do
00:24:17.340i don't know is this something that you actively think about when you're putting your videos
00:24:20.520together or do you not actively think about sort of this envelope pushing i think about it all the
00:24:25.600time i constantly have similar comments comments as you where it's like how could you make this