Conflicted Interest

0:37 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler. And I'm still Woe. On today's own choir, we're going to be discussing conflicts of interest or conflicted interest. For anyone who is joining us after the break that we took for December, thank you for checking out the back catalog and for coming back. The break was very helpful for my sanity. Thank you for the folks who gave some very generous donations just before and after Christmas. We appreciate that's a lot. And if you just joined us, we are not the firebomb throwing maniacs that everybody says we are. So you start listening, like that's not remotely what I was told. One of the reasons that we're doing this week's episode about conflicted

1:19 interest is that we want to basically make the case that there are people in participation of the public discourse, of the conversations that are going on, both in both in public and in private, who should not be permitted to participate. There are people that need to be forced to shut up, not necessarily told to shut up unless they persist. But we have this egalitarian notion that everyone has to have their say and everyone has to participate. And there can be no possible discernment or regard for any particular man's motivations. You just say your piece. And it doesn't matter what sort of baggage or backstory anyone brings to the table. Everyone for every conversation you're just completely starting from scratch.

2:03 Which is just crazy. That's not how human anything has ever worked. So we're going to make the case today for very basic principle that you find in the court system, you find in the civil law and contracts. And more generally it's something that I think we intuit some, but we do not apply it as rigorously as we should. And so we're gonna lay out some basic principles today for how to determine when something is a conflict of interest, when you have a conflicted interest. And again, the point is that when these things are detected, you have to change your attitude towards the person who's speaking because the presence of one of these conflicts conflict doesn't mean they're oh they're conflicted

2:46 emotion. And so, you know, they're in turmoil or something. What it means is that they have two competing duties, and those competing duties are going to be waging war within that individual in a way that's probably going to be invisible to you, but it's going to be shaping what they do in such a way that you can't trust their outputs. Doesn't mean they're a bad person, it doesn't mean they're a liar. There's no negative moral connotation to someone having a conflict of interest. It simply means that for this particular set of circumstances, this guy you shouldn't listen to just because he's got something else going on that you don't. So that's the purpose of the episode. We often see everyone wants to you know get at the table

3:26 and have his voice made public for everyone to hear and be taken seriously. But when you start looking at the backgrounds, you know, the genealogies of the men who are making those points, some wild things often emerge. And Corey and I have both seen this go on for years now where every time somebody comes after us for some particular subject and we'll get into a couple of those, it's inevitable that we'll find something in their personal backstory Story that shows that they have a bias. They have a conflict of interest that will cause them to oppose us, regardless of principle, regardless of whether we're right or wrong, you know, we're making some scriptural argument. They have a competing interest because what we're saying indicts them somehow.

4:08 Not that it's a personal attack. It's just this is wrong and this person was doing something that we're saying is wrong. When they defend the thing that we're saying is wrong and they don't disclose that they're guilty of doing it, you know, guilt is begging the question. Maybe they're not guilty of anything, but the question is if the thing is wrong and this person is doing it, they should tell you that they're one of the people doing the thing. Say, I'm doing this, and so here's why it's not at all wrong. That would at least be honest. That would be a disclosure of, you know what? I've been a participant in this thing for years. Let me tell you how it's fine. That would be an honest approach of saying, look, here's my personal

4:41 bias, here's where I'm coming from. But that's never anyone's opening salvo. And we try to make it a key part of when we make arguments. Many people have been going back and listening to the back catalog. In fact, our bandwidth for the last month where we didn't have an episode was as high as if we had. There's so many people going back is you know, when you get into the every episode that we've done, there's some meat there. There's something that's worth relistening to. The stuff is evergreen. Like we've succeeded in that. One of the things you'll very frequently hear us say is that we're not trying to defend ourselves by making some particular argument. We did an episode where just as an aside I mentioned for

5:19 a couple minutes talking about interracial marriages and the laws in the past because we had been attacked for criticizing that. And I sort of abruptly ended my explanation by saying I'm not trying to defend our position. I'm just trying to explain there is an argument to be made that these guys don't want you to hear. And so I wasn't trying to defend what we said. I wasn't trying to convince anyone. And you'll hear me often say that where I'll like I'll say something to the effect that I'm not trying to you know make myself look good or trying to defend what we're doing. The reason for that is this, is that there's a conflict of interest in me telling you I'm a good guy. That's inherently conflicted because every man naturally wants everyone to think he's

5:59 a good guy. No one wants to be hated and despised. You want people to think well of you. It's a pretty weird, messed up person who actively wants to be hated. So for Quarry or me to say, look, we're the good guys actually, here's all the reasons why we're good guys, that's completely conflicted. So we don't make those arguments because we know it's not convincing. I don't want anyone to get used to being convinced by unconvincing arguments, even if they're from us. So we'll point to things like here's a case where we are saying we're not guilty of anything, but that's also us defending ourselves, so you can't take that seriously just at face value. The distinction when you're looking at conflicts of interest is that there

6:39 are motivations and there are you know maybe hidden facts and then there are public facts that someone can bring to bear and there are opinions. So, you know, for example, if I make an argument that people find super offensive, maybe I can lay out facts for here is why the argument is you know grounded in history and scripture or whatever, but if I have been positioned as the loathsome participant, I'm naturally going to be conflicted by trying to convince you I'm not loathsome. So the most that I can do at that point, once it's turned into a personality conflict and not just a discussion of ideas, which is how these things always end up when the fire is incoming. The most that we can do is lay out the facts, lay

7:22 out the argument. We always have to acknowledge when we make an argument, we're doing it in such a way that will exonerate us as being evil. And so it's it's an inherent part of these episodes where we're tackling controversial subjects that people don't like and they get upset about. If we convince you, we're also secondarily convincing you that we're not the bad guys. And we would never even have to do that if not for the volume of slander that's been directed. So it's sort of unavoidable that to talk about the subject to convince someone, they're gonna conclude, well, if that guy was right about that and he wasn't doing anything that was really wrong, I'm not sure why I should hate him. There's a conflict of interest for us to try to make you

8:03 really like us, and I don't want to be likable. I'm not a dislikable guy, but that's not the purpose of anything that we do. Our purpose is to convey information. And a lot of people take that the wrong way. And some people take it the right way. Nothing we can do about it. It's personally important to me to play with my cards face up on all these things. I I like doing this stuff on hard mode. Like saying here's everything wrong with me personally, here's everything weak about this position, and it still survives. You can put the least favorable light on some of the things that we say and it's still true. I'm fine with that because that's a convincing argument. Even if you hate me. It's funny, there are a lot of people on X that I

8:44 see who block me and don't like me and don't like Corey and don't like Stone Choir who are now quoting us indirectly, but they're quoting people who are saying exactly the things that we're saying. And they're saying things that made them hate us and block us in the first place, and yet now they agree. That's a natural part of persuasion is that sometimes you make a dent and people just sort of move on with their lives and they forget where they got it. So the person who has been slandered can never hope to recover his name. And the person who is concealing that he has some purpose is doing something dishonest by not disclosing those things. So as we go through this today, we just want people to

9:25 understand that it's important to detect when there's a conflict. to detect what an interest is. And then just to be rational about, well, I'll take the facts from that guy. And that's why we're episodes or you know we make arguments. They're based around facts. And so we present, here's a package deal, take it or leave it, pick it apart, go discuss it amongst yourselves, and then we're not a part of it. We're not trying to invite ourselves into your lives or anything. It's just this is important. Here's something that you can do with it. When you look at conflict of interest or conflicted interest, interest in this context that we're talking about is fundamentally about a person's purpose,

10:03 a person's agenda, their values, their things that they derive some good from versus suffering some harm for. So, you know, example would be income, livelihood, reputation. Each of us has a natural interest in making money, having income, being able to eat, being able to clothe and feed and house yourself, and not being hated by your friends and neighbors, having a reputation that's a good reputation. That's a natural interest. There's nothing wrong or perverted about that. There's nothing untoward. It's just this is mine. Yeah, we talked about that in the jealousy episode. You have things that are yours, yours particularly and uniquely and exclusively. Jealousy is about that which is exclusively yours.

10:46 Your wife and your children are exclusively yours. They don't belong to anyone else. Not to the state, not to your neighbor, not to anybody else but you. That's an interest. So there's nothing bad about having an interest. The conflict arises when two interests that you hold, whether or not you hold them equally, are themselves in opposition. And that's where the conflict comes in. So say for example, you know, you have a wife and you have kids and you have your stuff, your life, and you get some new job offer that's gonna be a lot more money, but it's gonna involve moving, disrupting everything, making life harder on everybody else, but it's a really good job opportunity. If you were single, you'd be gone in a second.

11:30 It wouldn't even think twice about leaving. But the conflict is that well, your whole family is gonna be along for the ride. And so, you know, it it's not a bad situation. It's just you have to choose between potentially competing things that you're gonna have to pick a winner. You're gonna have to pick do I inconvenience my family, my children, all their lives for something that's going to be good for me professionally. Now the benefit of being a father and a husband is that generally those things that benefit you will also at least trickle down and benefit your family. So that's not necessarily a hard sell, but there's still a conflict there. The thing that is a single guy would be just brain

12:08 dead simple gets a lot more complicated when someone else might be injured somehow by it. Not a serious injury, but you know, having to move kids and uproot your home and pack and like it's stressful, it's hard. It's unpleasant. Especially once kids are in school. That's really difficult socially. I know I did it seven times. So that's not a desirable outcome. Maybe the job is worth it, especially if it, you know, it's opening new career horizons that's gonna be good for the whole family. That's a conflict of interest. There's nothing bad there. It's not like you have two terrible options, you have two good options, and you have to weigh them and understand them. The reason for pointing out the things like that, and that's a

12:48 very trivial example, and it's an internal one, is that those conflicts have to be resolved and they're going to be resolved by one winning and one losing. Now hopefully the winner is a big winner and the losers loser in a very small way. In the case of a job opportunity, sure, it's mild inconvenience for your kids, but you know, maybe if you're blessed, they're going to be closer to your extended family, you're going to be making a lot more money, so it's gonna be able to go to college or whatever. It's gonna be a huge net win with a tiny bit of downside. So it's it's entirely possible to resolve a conflict of interest without sin, without any big blow-up or disaster. But it's important to acknowledge that there's one there.

13:27 The wrong approach would be to deny that there's any conflict of interest there at all. It's like, oh, I can make twice as much money doing something that I like a whole lot more and it's gonna be really good for me. Family, we're moving. If you completely disregard the downsides to your family, however small relatively, you're doing something wrong. You're not acknowledging that there's competing interests there. And those are your interests too. Because the welfare and the happiness of your wife and your children are also very important things to you. In the long run, they're more important than a job opportunity. But the thing is, you know, with a job opportunity in particular, they're usually gonna be somewhat aligned.

14:05 You know, unless you're in a situation where you're gonna make twice as much money 'cause you're gonna work twice as long, then maybe that would be something would change the equation. There the conflict might be it's not worth it. I'm never gonna see my kids again if I do this. Sure we'll be richer, we'll have a nicer house, but it's not worth missing out on seeing my own children grow up. So the purpose of acknowledging conflicts of interest exist is just to be honest about the situation. And then when we extrapolate that to when it's a third party that's doing something, then it gets really tricky because you have to weigh in mentally on what somebody else's motivations are. You have to be looking from afar at someone who's internally conflicted

14:45 and maybe they're concealing it. And if you don't recognize what their internal conflict is, you're just gonna list whatever they're saying, not realizing that they have motives to say something for one interest that may be actually harming the other interest. And maybe you are more invested in the other interest. The thing that they're not worried about is the one that actually applies to applies to you. And that's why it's a relevant conversation for all of us, because when we're all talking about these things publicly, to just leave that stuff out creates a mess. It creates a situation where you have some voice in your ear telling you to say or do or believe or act in some certain way, and they've not told you the truth about why they're

15:25 telling you. It's simply a question of disclosure. Because if they did tell you what they cared about, what their competing motivations were, maybe you wouldn't listen at all. And in fact, in some cases, you absolutely should not. There are some people for certain situations, certain topics, where you should not listen to them because they're conflicted. And it doesn't mean they're bad, doesn't mean they're sinful or evil. It just means that they have an internal problem to resolve and that's for them, but they can't participate in the conversation that we're having here. So here at the outset of this episode, I want to note that we are not going to be addressing specific sections of scripture

16:05 in this episode. I know that some of you want us to cite a verse for absolutely everything we say. This is a tendency that has become very common in the modern church, and it's simply not Christian. It's not rational, but it's also not Christian. Scripture does not speak to every single issue of human life. Because that's not the point of Scripture. In so far as Scripture addresses a topic, it is absolutely correct, and it is binding on the Christian, assuming, of course, it's not just a narrative passage of Scripture. There are sections of Scripture that simply relay history without passing judgment at least explicitly on it. But those parts that speak about morality and matters like that are

16:57 of course absolutely true and binding. And to some degree scripture does speak on this issue in a tangential way. And we've gone over that in previous episodes, because of course we've addressed the issues of speaking the truth, we've addressed the issue of lying, various things related to that. And so scripture does speak on tangential issues, and we've addressed those. You can go back and listen to those episodes, in particular the one on truth and lies. But that's not exactly what we're addressing in this episode. Because we are not necessarily addressing instances in which men are lying, in which they are distorting the truth. What we're addressing as well as emphasized there in the opening is

17:44 there are instances in which a man may have competing interests and he may speak in a certain way, even if it is not untruthful, the That may very well be biased in some way. And so you have to take that into account, and that leads into another point that I want to make here. This is a matter of wisdom. Unavoidably so. This is not one of those instances where we can give you a bunch of black letter law as it were. We can't give you a hierarchy of rules and you simply run down this list and then you come to an absolute conclusion on the matter. That's not how life works in many things. And again to emphasize, scripture does not speak explicitly on every single issue. Before we started recording we were talking about the fact that

18:38 Scripture doesn't really address the issue of say cooking. There are others as well. Scripture doesn't tell you exactly what to do with your wife on your wedding night. But there are matters that are not addressed, they are left to human wisdom, because God has given us wisdom. That is one of the gifts of God. It is given unequally, of course, but it is given to all men, and insofar as you've been given a measure of that, it is incumbent on you to exercise it, particularly in matters like this. And so when you're assessing how you How you should take the statements of another man, there are certain things that come into play. One of those is whether or not he has an interest in what he is saying.

19:23 Now, of course, I'm not speaking of just the general interest in being right, because you could very well be dealing with someone who's just argumentative and doing it for the sake of arguing. But beyond that interest in being right or winning the argument, whatever it happens to be. The man could be speaking in a completely objective fashion. It could be completely academic, disinterested. The only desire is to arrive at the truth of the matter, say a purely philosophical conversation which all parties are being forthright, being entirely honest. But by and large that's not how human beings operate. This is, to some degree, touching at the edges, as it were, of the enlightenment, which we will eventually get to do.

20:10 We will eventually get to addressing the enlightenment. But men are not tabla rasa. You're not a blank slate. You don't come into this world and you certainly don't become an actual adult human being without having a background, without having certain interests. And some of those interests are going to play into how you present your arguments, how you choose the words you use to present those arguments, for instance, and that should be taken into account by other men when they hear your arguments. Again, as Wo said, that's not to say that these men are necessarily being dishonest or misleading, although that can certainly come into play here. Because a man can have conflicted or conflicting interests without being

20:59 dishonest about it. Part of this is, of course, a matter of disclosure. Disclosures are by and large a good thing. We have them up and down our legal and our social system for very good reason. If you have a financial interest in something, and you are in a position to enact, say, some regulation or some law with regard to that financial interest, it is important that you disclose that, because it should be taken into account that you have this interest. It's one of the reasons that sometimes we use what's called a blind trust, in order to distance a man from having these sorts of conflicts. Because for instance, if you know all of your financial positions, and you are the lawmaker, or you are the regulator, then you do

21:50 have a conflict of interest. And the reason that you have that conflict is because you know in the back of your mind, if I do this thing that my job requires me to do, that objectively I need to do, I am going to harm my financial position. And as Wo said, that's not necessarily a bad consideration, because as a man, you have a duty to care for your family. You have a duty to care for yourself as well. But you have a duty to care for your wife and your children. And so having an interest in that is not in and of itself bad. But when you have that conflict, you are going to have to choose. In some cases, obviously, the choice is easier than in others. If you are a regulator, you are supposed to choose the objective

22:38 path. Because you are supposed to do what is in this case right. And so you can't side with your own financial interest because it is a financial interest. But the disclosure, on the one hand, helps to guard against that because it gives other men information necessary to assess what you are doing. On the other hand, the instrument of a blind trust, how that works for those who aren't aware, is the is that your financial positions are put into a trust that is then managed by another man or entity, and you do not know your own financial positions. You know that you have a certain amount of money and you can look at the performance numbers, but you don't know, for instance, that you are holding Apple stock or Microsoft stock or whatever

23:25 it happens to be. And so if you are a regulator, regulating those companies, you don't have that conflict of interest because you don't know. You can't have the bias because you don't know that you hold that specific financial position. It's an instrument we use in order to address this issue This is also something that comes up obviously all over the legal system. In a particular way, it comes up with regard to witnesses in the civil courts and also in the criminal courts. It's what's called impeachment, not in the sort of grand sense of removing a man from office, for instance, the president, but in the sense of impeaching the testimony of a witness, which is to say, casting doubt on what he has said, or at least giving the

24:15 jury, the finder of fact, information with regard to that testimony. There are a number of ways this is done in the civil courts. Primarily it would be to introduce factual evidence that proves a contradiction, introducing a prior inconsistent statement the witness has said something in the past that is not That is inconsistent with what he has said on the stand. In some limited instances you can introduce character evidence, which is basically saying this man is a liar, you shouldn't trust him. That's very limited. The rules are complicated. It's not the issue for today. And the other one is bias. Those are the four big ones. Bias is the one we're really dealing with here. And bias is not necessarily a bad thing.

25:02 When you hear the word bias, you're probably naturally inclined to think, oh, that's bad. Bias is something you shouldn't have. You should be unbiased. You should be objective. No, you shouldn't be. Not always. In some cases, yes, absolutely you should be objective. If you are a judge, you are required by your office to be objective. If you are a husband, you are required by your office to be biased in favor of your wife. Bias is not always bad. Bias is one way of speaking about duty. If you have a duty to someone or something, that duty, generally speaking, is to be biased in favor of that person or thing. And so bias by itself is a neutral term. In this context, do not think of bias as having a moral

25:53 slant, as it were, in either direction, because depending on the specific facts, it can be positive or negative. If you have a bias against something when you should not, then that is negative. If you have a bias for something when you should, then that is positive. There is a difference between those two, and it's important to note that. And so with regard to interests, a man can have either a good interest or a bad interest, because of course you can be in the negative sense biased against something. But these interests should be taken into account. It does not mean, as Wo said in his opening, that a man cannot be trusted. Because every man has interests. Every man has biases. There is no such thing as

26:46 a man who is free from all these things, because that wouldn't be a man, that'd be a machine. And even then, the machine probably has biases programmed into it by men. It's not that because a man has an interest that you cannot trust him. It is that you have to take that into your calculation of how you weigh what he has said. And again, that is a matter of wisdom. And in some cases, it is a matter of excluding him from the discussion. Now, some are going to think you can't possibly do that. Every man has to have his seat at the table, everyone has to be heard and that's simply not how any of this works. It's certainly not how it works in the courts. We don't call every single person who is at all relevant to

27:35 the particular matter to be a witness. That would be burdensome to the point where nothing would ever function, as little as it functions at present anyway. You can't give everyone a seat at the table to be heard on every issue, and some men, by virtue of their set of interests should not be heard, because they have a bias that is harmful to the discussion. This is not necessarily just to defend the discussion itself, just to defend the attempt to arrive at the correct conclusion, to arrive at the truth. That should always be the goal here, of course. Insofar as there is an actual truth in play, which there usually is, it is also to protect the man who has the conflict of interest. And the way in which he is protected by being excluded from

28:30 the discussion is that he doesn't have to choose. By and large we should endeavor never to put a man in a position where he has to choose between his family or his nation, or his family or his church, or his financial interests or the truth, it is better to insulate that man to shield him from having to make that choice Because if you put a man, say, in a position, to give an extreme example, where he has to choose a course with regard to regulating an industry, and if he chooses the course that is objectively correct, he destroys his financial position, or he can act corruptly and make himself a great deal of money. You should not put a man in that in that position. It is one of the reasons, again, that we use things like

29:25 a blind trust, because we don't want to put a man in a position where he has this conflict of interest. By and large, because very few men are going to make the right choice, but also because you simply don't want to do that to another man. As a Christian, you should not want to put someone in that position. If you find yourself in that position, it is morally incumbent on you to do the right thing. But better by far if you are simply not put in that position. And so there is this twofold interest in excluding certain men from certain discussions. If a man has that conflict of interest, you protect him by excluding him, but you also on the other hand, the other side of the coin, you defend the discussion itself by excluding those who

30:13 have this conflict of interest. This helps to move the discussion along, as it were, and it also makes it so there's less of a burden with regard to assessing the individuals who are speaking to the issue. Because if you have a room full of men who are heavily conflicted in their interests, that's going to be very difficult as a question of wisdom to assess what each man is saying with regard to the discussion. If you have men who can be more objective because they don't have this conflict, it makes it much easier to assess the discussion. You're not wronging or harming the man who is not included. In fact, like I have said, you are protecting him in some ways. What you are doing is ensuring that you arrive at a

31:05 proper conclusion by excluding those who have this conflict. It's not always possible, of course, to exclude those who have a conflict of interest, because again, every man has a collection of interests. Not all of them are compatible. Some of them conflict naturally. That is simply part of this life. You have this every single day. You have a certain number of hours in the day, and you have a certain number of things you'd like to get done, there's a conflict there, because often, basically always, you can't get done everything you would like to get done in a given day. Certainly not everything you'd like to get done on a grander scale, and so you have to choose. There is a conflict of your interests with regard to how you

31:52 spend your time. In that case, probably not a particularly harmful outcome regardless of which one you choose. Could be, usually isn't. When we are speaking about issues on the grander scale, political questions, and things like that, the There is a great deal of potential harm if we do not arrive at a correct conclusion. And so including those who have this conflict of interest harms what is essentially the greater good, harms this more important outcome. And we have to take that into account. And so again, it's not a matter of saying that those who have this conflict of interests are necessarily going to lie. We're not saying anyone is necessarily a liar. If you have a financial position, a financial interest, in the outcome

32:52 of a decision, it does not mean necessarily that you will choose to act, you will choose to decide in favor of your financial interests. If what is right actually harms your financial interests, you are in fact still free to make that right choice, but you have that conflict. And so that has to be taken into account by other men. And putting you in that position does actually cause you a certain kind of harm because it's forcing you to choose between legitimate interests. And we're talking about legitimate interests here. We're not talking in this episode about those who are malicious, about those who are seeking to cause harm. And those are certainly men who are out there. That is also a possibility.

33:39 And again, a matter of wisdom You have to assess those men. You have to assess the motives of those who are engaged in the discussion. And part of the way that you can assess those motives is whether or not men make disclosures. Generally speaking, the men who are willing to come forward and make disclosures with regard to their interests, whether it's a financial position or a personal stake Whatever it happens to be, by and large those men should generally be trusted more because they have made the necessary or at least the helpful disclosures. They are playing with their cards face up. Which in this sort of situation, in these matters, that is vitally important. If I were, again, to use the obvious example, if I

34:30 were regulating a given industry, I I would be legally speaking, probably required, but I would be morally bound to a certain degree to disclose my financial interests in the companies I would be regulating. Because if I didn't do that, it would be seen as at the very least suspicious and probably dishonest. The same thing is true with regard to political discussions or even religious discussions. Men should disclose their interest in the outcome, their interest with regard to the statements they are making It's one of the reasons that Woe and I do not hide that we're Lutheran. We are going to let you know up front that we are Lutheran, we are going to make arguments from that Lutheran background, we

35:24 are going to make arguments that are consonant with what we believe as Lutherans. Now we're not saying that we make these arguments because we are Lutheran. Rather, we are Lutheran because we believe that Lutheranism is consistent with Scripture, is consistent with the arguments that we are making, the things that we are advancing. But we let you know up front that we're Lutheran because it's a form of disclosure. We're not going to hide that from you. We're going to let you know that this is what we believe. We are going to make certain arguments because we believe that those arguments are consonant with what we believe because we believe all of this is consistent with scripture. That is a form of disclosure.

36:10 Similar to the form of disclosure that you would give in the financial context with regard to stock positions. I'm regulating Apple. I own ten thousand shares in Apple. That's relevant. These are things that you have to tell the relevant audience, whether it's the world or a podcast audience, or the other men at the discussion table, it's important to have these things on the table so that other men can make an accurate wisdom call. It doesn't mean that you're a liar because you have this conflict of interests. It means that you have that conflict, and other men recognize that because they have conflicts as well. Just because you have this set of things pulling you in different directions does not mean that you will lie.

36:59 It does not mean you will mislead or deceive or any of these other things. It just means that you have to make that decision. And so it may be necessary to exclude you from the discussion, to avoid putting you in the position where you have to choose, to avoid putting you in the position where you may very well be strongly incentivized to mislead, to deceive, to lie. It is better from a Christian standpoint to exclude men from those discussions and not put them in a position where they are very tempted to sin. And again it's not just because Because of the protection of the discussion itself. It is also for the protection of that man. And these are somewhat abstract discussions to a certain degree.

37:47 I've given some concrete examples and we'll go through some more as we continue along in this episode. But this is not an abstract matter. This is a very concrete everyday matter. This is something that we do constantly in our lives. We know that individuals have biases, have interests. We know that those things conflict. We know that a man may be arguing for something because he has a stake in it, and that's not always wrong. If you are arguing for something that will help your family, you are doing your duty. But just because you are doing a particular duty, fulfilling a particular duty, does not mean that you are suited to the discussion in question, and it may very well mean that you should make some

38:34 sort of disclosure with regard to your interest, with regard to your position as well And why you are advancing the thing you are advancing. As I explained earlier, this is something we do in the civil courts because we recognize that a witness probably has an interest in what he is saying. He may have an interest because he was involved in the crime. That's relevant. He may have an interest because the outcome of the case affects his bottom line. That's relevant. All of these things have to be taken into consideration because this is a wisdom call, and it is unavoidably so. There are certain episodes where yes, we can give you a black and white list of rules, as it were, we can say, if this, then that.

39:21 This is not one of those episodes. Because again, just because a man has an interest does not mean he is going to act in a way that is wrongful or immoral or deceitful or anything like that. It just means that it is something you have to take into account when you are making this assessment pursuing Pursuant to the measure of wisdom that God has given you. The reason for giving those financial examples is that one it's the most common one that we One that we see out in public being called a conflict of interest. But it's also because financial examples are quantifiable. You understand that if you have a stake in something and you make some decision that's going to harm that business interest, you jeopardize,

40:12 maybe you lose the stake. So they're quantifiable losses if your competing interests are such that you end up choosing against whatever is going to cause you to lose your money. Most of the problems that we are dealing with are not financial at all. They're matters of doctrine, they're matters of politics, they're matters of policy and procedure. How do we operate a society? How do we operate a church? How do we operate a DM group? Pick any sphere you want. You have to decide as a group of men who are gathered together How do we make this thing work? And the men who should be participating in that need to have their cards face up for this example. Like you can't be hiding something when you're trying to establish, especially

41:01 when you're trying to change things. And frankly, it's pretty much all we talk about on Stone Choir is here's something that's going wrong, and here's how we need to change it. One example that comes up occasionally where people will snipe at Corey and me and say, Don't listen to those guys. They're not married. They don't have kids. Woe's divorced. As though that means that we can't possibly have anything to say about anything. Now, I don't think that I disclosed I was divorced before I was doxxed, 'cause that's information that would have contributed, but I never concealed the fact that I wasn't married. And you know I didn't lie about anything. If Corey and I were saying you, dear listener, should also get

41:46 divorced, you should not have kids, you shouldn't be married, that would be a very clear conflict of interest because that would be us justifying the things in our lives that have problems with them and saying you should be just like us, then we'll fit in. We'll be okay if we make you like us. And so here it's fine, you can do that. The conflict only goes one way, and we've never said anything like that. We've only ever said the opposite. We have only ever encouraged men to start families, to get married, to pick a girl they're gonna stay married to, not to get divorced, to do things that will ensure that you remain happily married. So the opposite of conflict of interest is basically to some degree throwing

42:31 yourself under the bus, which is kind of what we're doing when we talk about those things. When I tell you that you should get married and have kids, which is absolutely true, like that's not original. That's God's order. That's the way everything is supposed to be. And it didn't used to be that you needed any sort of salesmanship for that. It's only in the last few generations in the West that we forgot how that was even supposed to work. And I did too in my personal life. And made mistakes that led to the point that I'm single, I don't have kids, and I'm divorced. Not something I would commend to anyone, but that's kind of the state of the world as it's falling apart, and it's a bad thing. I don't wish that on anyone.

43:11 It's absurd to say don't listen to Stone Choir because they don't have kids, or that, you know, we don't have wives. It's an absurdity on its face because it doesn't communicate anything. There's no conflict there. It's really kind of a bizarre thing because a lot of you who are listening don't have wives, don't have kids. You dearly wish that you did. And I dearly wish that you do as well. I pray for that for everyone. There's no conflict there because I'm saying please don't turn out like me. The conflicted version of that story would be, no, it's fine to live like me. In fact, live like Andrew Tate. Andrew Tate is conflicted. He has a conflict of interest because he's living a debauched, worthless

43:54 lifestyle that he then tries to sell to others and hold himself out as an example of turnout like me. There's a conflict of interest when you say, Hey, turn out like me. Simply, you know, forget selling anything. Just the fact that other people would approve of your choices, of your decisions, there's necessarily some upside there. Even if it's purely just the psychic benefit of people like me, the the warm fuzzy glow of being loved and beloved by complete strangers on the internet for whatever good that does. The conflict comes in when there are bad things about whatever's going on and you sell them anyway. So Cory and I don't really talk about child rearing, very little, apart from fathers teach your kids to do these things.

44:38 Is that invalid because we don't have kids? No, that's absurd. Now, to pause for a second, what I'm doing here is a conflict of interest, because I'm telling you that we have not done anything wrong by discussing these things in the manner that we discuss them. That's necessarily conflicted because I have every incentive for you not to dislike me. Doesn't mean I'm lying, which is why I said in the intro someone who has a conflict of interest in a participation of a discussion can present fact. And so that's all I'm doing here is saying, look, here's the things that we say and here are the things that we don't say. If you can look at that and indict it and say that we are terrible wicked men for the things that we've said,

45:20 fine. That's why I always say take it or leave it. I'm not trying to sell anything, certainly of myself, because I know that there's a conflict of interest. I'm not trying to make you like me. So when you look at what we say, and again, this this example, it's not to make people look at us, it's because it's a prime example of a conflict of interest. If we were saying don't have kids, don't get married, just live alone and do whatever stuff and then leave nothing behind, that would be a very clear conflict of interest because we would be saying you can be like us and that's okay. I don't think that. I don't wish that for anyone. If Assuming I outlive my parents, there won't even be anyone to

46:01 bury me. That kind of stinks. I don't want that for anyone. I also don't worry about it. I don't care because I'll be dead. Like it's kind of embarrassing, I guess, but whatever. It's not my problem. I'll be in heaven. I don't want that for anybody else. I can be indifferent to my own state and yet earnestly desire that someone else not turn out like that. But that's what you get. That's the cat lady trajectory is that. Dies alone with fifty cats and the cats eat her because there's nobody else around. That's a bad outcome. It is bad for society, it's bad for the individual, it's horrible. So the conflict of interest is if someone's pitching that terrible outcome and the world is full of people doing that.

46:40 The world is full of Andrew Tate saying, be a debauched moron like me. We do the opposite. So you have to decide for yourself, can these guys participate in certain types of conversations? And there are lots of conversations that we deliberately exclude ourselves from. I've been involved in multiple groups that have had side dad chats. Never once have I wanted to insinuate myself into dad chat. Never mind I wouldn't be invited, but that makes perfect sense for me to be excluded because I don't have kids. I'm sure I'd have things to contribute, but I'm not being left out because it's dad chat. I'm not a dad. I don't get to do that. And that's fine. That's exactly the way it should be. Dads need a place to commiserate amongst themselves about the crazy things

47:22 that their wives and their kids do, and enjoy that sort of camaraderie. That's only possible with other men who know the thing personally. It doesn't matter that I might have good opinions and wouldn't be disruptive or whatever. I don't belong in dad chat because I'm not a dad. The conflict of interest would be say, no, bring me in because I'm really smart and clever and I got lots of fun things to say you should listen to me too. Probably wouldn't make a mess, but it would still be stupid, because I don't belong. It's perfectly okay to identify people who don't belong and then exclude them on the basis of things about them. That's how civilization has always worked. We have gotten away from being able to do that.

48:00 We've gotten away from being able to exclude people and say, no, you don't belong here for these purposes. Now, you know, this example of people saying don't listen to Stone Choir because we don't have families. Well, if you think that's persuasive, okay. Like it would be conflict of interest for me to convince anyone otherwise. I'm telling you that I think if you examine that rationally and you look at the fact At the facts, it's dumb. But whatever. For me to say it's dumb is both true and completely biased. Because if you agree with me, then I win something. I win somebody saying that yeah, you're okay. The greater problem that we face is that the discussion of the ideas can't be separated from the men, but

48:42 sometimes it's just situational. You know, I'm not going to give a bunch of parenting advice certainly unbidden. You know, every so often people ask me for my advice about things and I disclose like, look, I was married and I got divorced and I don't have kids, so I can tell you what I think, but please take it with a grain of salt. And then I will give them the best advice I possibly can, only if asked. I'm never gonna chase anybody around and giving them advice. I don't think I've ever harmed anyone by anything I've said. I have a fair degree of wisdom about things, but it can only possibly be from the place of generic advice and not experience. So the conflict there is that if I'm trying to convince you

49:20 to include me, then I'm selling something. If someone comes to me and says, Look, I know you're conflicted, but you also do a pretty good job with the stuff. What do you think? Like, sure. I'm happy to help is any way I can. You know, the divorce thing is particularly funny because I was married for 10 years. I got married when I was 24. I was married for 10 years, which is longer than a lot of the guys who criticize me for being divorced or for not being married. I would have said up until the afternoon that I found out I wasn't going to be married anymore, but I would have said I was happily married. Now, looking back, you know, doing a post-mortem on things, I can see mistakes that I made along the way.

49:56 I can certainly tell you any number of things that you can do to have a failed marriage. And I can tell you, you know, the opposite of those is going to make your marriage work better. I don't go around doing that precisely because there's a conflict. For me, the divorce guy to go around telling people how to be happily married, it's just kind of gross. Even if it's right, even if everything that I would say is completely factual, there's still kind of an inherent grossness to the bias of someone who has this conflict saying, no, look, I'm still an expert, even though mine burned down. Let me tell you how to do your marriage right. It's preposterous. So as much as possible, I avoid it, even though I do

50:32 have things to say, simply for appearances, not for the sake of of looking good, just that the world doesn't need more people who are bad at things who have proven to have done something wrong trying to play. On the other hand, the guys who think that their marriages are perfect and that they can never possibly get divorced are often deluding themselves to some degree because the world is screwed up and the pressures on families are horrific. The pressures on girls, especially with you know, no fault divorce is completely universal. It's very easy for th these things to be contagious. Divorce itself is actually contagious in social circles. A lot of people will have seen circumstances where one couple gets

51:14 divorced and all the girlfriends of that woman who got divorced within a few years, most of them are too. That's contagion. It's evil. It's spiritual disease. It's spiritual rot. But the legal system makes it so easy that all someone has to do is get an idea. Oh, I don't want I'd be happier doing something else. And it doesn't take very long to burn down a marriage. So I would just warn guys who are like, oh, these guys don't know what they're talking about, and you shouldn't listen to them from a perspective of being smug about their own marriages. That's you're just asking for trouble. Don't do that. Worry about doing your own thing well, don't worry about saying how bad I am at doing things.

51:54 And again, this is mercenary for me to defend myself. I freely acknowledge that. So if you think I'm being a jerk by saying I didn't do anything wrong, fine. it's a conflict of interest for me to get you to agree with me. And this is us playing with our cards face up. I can tell you all of these things because I believe that the argument stands. If you agree with me that not getting divorced is good, I lose. If you agree with me that having kids is good, I lose. There's no conflict there. The greater the success that we have in getting people to do what God says about these things, the worse we look. And I'm okay with that. And as we've said before, the specifics of our lives, the fact that I have no family, I have no kids, I have nothing

52:37 that would cause me harm if and when I was doxxed and after I've been doxed, ongoing threats in hatred and all the other crap. It's fine because it's only directed at me. This podcast would not exist if I had a wife and kids. It simply wouldn't. Because I couldn't take the chance of doing this. Because I wouldn't just be YOLOing for myself anymore. I would be involving a wife. I would be involving kids who have to go to school, who would be hated and berated and abused, who would be suffering for things that I am saying and things that I'm doing. I would never do that as a married man. And that's really what the message is when guys like, don't listen to those they should just have wives, they should shut up and

53:17 get off the internet. What we're doing here that's having such profoundly beneficial effect on people can only exist because of our personal failures. That's simply a fact. I don't think that the guys who agree with us who have kids and have you know happy, good families. You aren't cowards for not doing what we do. You have to keep your heads down. You had to feed your kids. That's exactly what you need to do because you have a conflict of interest, just like I do. Your conflict of interest is on one hand, I know all these things are true and I think that it's important that they be said. On the other hand, if I say them in public, I'll be destroyed and I might not be able to feed my family

53:57 and my wife is gonna get hated and my kids are gonna be abused at school and I can't do that to them. That's a conflict of interest. And you resolve it by keeping your mouth shut in public. And you're not a coward for doing it. You're choosing correctly. I don't have that particular conflict. I don't have anything to lose except for my life and whatever material possessions I have, and I'm not attached to either one of those things. Beyond like I'm thankful that God has given me these gifts, but I'm using them as best I can to serve his purposes for the benefit of others. It's a completely self-serving comment if I'm selling something, but the question for the objective observer is is it true or not?

54:38 And if you think it's false, fine. And if you think it's true, okay, like that's the reason we're able to do what we do. But the fact that over and over again people want to tell us you should stop doing the thing that you're doing that's so effective and go be just like me, that's conflicted too. It's not that the generic advice is bad, it's that it doesn't address the specific situation. So there are lots of conversations where I'm happy to be excluded from I should be excluded. And that's good order. There are other conversations like it doesn't matter if I'm one of the people speaking, but everyone else has to decide that for themselves. Don't let me convince you that I get to play, because that's

55:22 conflicted, even if I'm right. That's the whole point here. The guy who's trying to say, let me play, the guy who's saying, look, what I'm doing is okay, he's conflicted all by itself. Doesn't matter if there's money on the line. He has a reputation. He's being included. There's the social benefit. There's just being part of the crowd. That all by itself creates a conflict when you're gonna be the winner. It's a separate question if you're gonna be the loser. If I tell you something that's true that makes me look bad, okay. So it goes. Let me be an example. I remember in high school we had a motivational speaker who had abused PCP. And so he came in and he was dressed very shabbily and you know it was clear this kind of how he probably made

56:08 a lot of his money. I don't think he had any job prospects. So going around and speaking to high school kids was his thing. And I very clearly remember this. Like it was an effective motivational speech. He talked about having been hardcore drug abuser who took PCP or angel dust. I'm not gonna describe how he injured himself, like the specifics, but when he made his case to prove that the story he was telling was true, as part of one of his drug trips, he had lost an eye. And to prove this, I don't remember if he had spectacles or not, but he if he did, he took them off. But he took the microphone, you know, the big bulky microphone, held it up to one of his eyes, and he pulled out a pair of nail clippers in his other hand and he tapped his

56:53 eyeball to show that it was a glass eye, it was a fake eye because he had injured it and lost it as a result of abusing PCP. He was telling us something terrible about himself. And it stuck with me. Like I said, it was pretty effective. Like, okay, I'm not gonna do drugs. I don't want it like it was just gruesome. The story was gruesome. I'm not gonna give you the details, but that I remember them like thirty years later. He was paid to be there, probably next to nothing. He was saying something about himself that was embarrassing to a bunch of teenage kids who were kind of laughing at him. And he did it anyway, because it was an important thing to say, Look, you think that you can mess around with the stuff

57:33 and you'll be all right, and it's simply not true. So the fact that he would stand up there and he would make himself look bad for the sake of sake of other people lent him more credibility than the principal standing up there and saying, Don't do drugs, kid. Like, that's not persuasive. It's not persuasive when someone who isn't a drug user, who doesn't do anything tells you not to do something. I've never even smoked a cigarette. I'm basically completely straight edge except for alcohol. Inadvertently I never really drank alcohol those about thirty. I wasn't trying to be straight edge, I was just wasn't that interested in it. So for me to tell anybody, don't do drugs, doesn't have any credibility. Because like, what do I know?

58:14 Like I can give you science and studies and crap, but there's no credibility to someone saying be just like me. That's a conflict of interest. The guy who started out smoking weed and ended up smoking PCP and losing his eye as a result of it, he has credibility when he says don't do drugs. Because despite the fact that he was paid some pittance, there was not really a conflict of interest there. He was telling a true story, which is part of why he took out the nail clippers. Like he wasn't just weaving a tail. He actually lost his eye because he was messing around with drugs. So that's persuasive because the facts were presented and there was no conflict of interest from the guy. If the principal had stood up there and told the same story

58:59 about the third party, like, you know, there's this guy, like I'm telling you, I'm telling you that someone took PCP and he lost his eye and so don't do drugs, which is a pretty good message. But it doesn't have the credibility of the man saying it himself. Because when you look at the evidence and you look at whether there are conflicts or not, his interest in not being made fun of or laughed at by teenage boys and girls in an audience, was outweighed by his interest in and wanting to help people, and wanting his stupidity and his failures in his life to not be a complete waste. Sometimes when someone can act in some fashion as a motivational speaker, that's kind of what it is. You know, if I talk about staying married, getting married, having kids,

59:45 it's a little bit like being a motivational speaker. If you conclude, well, wait, wait a minute, you don't have any of that. Yeah, you're right. I don't, and it stinks, and I don't want that for you. I lose if you agree with me. That's the principle that I want you to apply to these other circumstances. Again, this is not look at me, look at me. This is I'm showing you that if you agree with me about this one thing, I come out the loser for that argument. I come out the guy that doesn't have the thing that I want you to have. I want you to do better than me. That is the difference between conveying information honestly and having a conflict of interest about things. Because a lot of the discussions that we have online today are

1:00:25 dominated somehow by guys who do have these conflicts of interest. They're hiding the fact of whatever's going on in their family or their past life. And then they're arguing for the mistake for the things that they've done. Calling it a mistake is begging the question. Assuming it's completely fine that they did it, they should say, look, I did it and here's why it's okay. So I said at the beginning. It's perfectly fine for you to say that and disclose, look, if you agree with me, I win. I think it's a good thing. I want you to be a winner like me. You should do the same thing that I did. Someone who has to conceal personal facts in order to persuade you, they're betraying the fact that their conflict of interest is actually material.

1:01:06 If it were no big deal, that they had, you know, their kids were whatever, their wife was whatever, their background was whatever, if it didn't matter, they would disclose those things. They would say, here's part of my story, and here's how I got here, and here's why I think you should do this. I'm an expert because of this. That would at least disclose the conflict and it would significantly mitigate it. The guys who hide the details are the ones that are saying, A, I'm conflicted here. And B, it matters enough that I don't want you to know about it. And again, conflicted does not mean emotional turmoil. Conflicted is not a question of being torn in both directions and having some emotional state.

1:01:49 It's literally a question of competing interests. And oftentimes there are two good interests. One good interest goes in one direction, the other one goes in the other, and a man has to choose. And in his personal life, that's fine. The problem is when you get online or you get anywhere in real life where you're dealing with other people, if you're making the same pitch about whatever the subject is, and you're not disclosing that if you If you agree with me, I come out ahead here because I was guilty of doing that, or I'm innocent of doing that, but I did it. I was a participant in doing that. And if you agree with me, then you're saying that what I did was okay too. That's a conflict of interest.

1:02:26 That's the sort of person that shouldn't be a participant in those conversations because they're adding their voice in a scenario where they're effectively tricking people by not divulging something that's material, something that actually matters. If your kids or your wife or whatever, something that's very dear and important to you, if that has to be kept secret in order for you to participate in the conversation, that's a cover-up. That is an act of omission that is a deception. Because everyone else should be able to decide whether or not it's material. You don't get to decide that for yourself. And you certainly don't get to lie about it. When we're looking at these discussions, sometimes it's simply a question of

1:03:06 who gets to participate and who doesn't. I don't get to be in dad chat, and that's fine. I don't belong there. I'm not going to be the guy who's giving long form discussions about here's how to have a happy marriage. I can tell you have a failed marriage. And I can tell you some things that if you did the opposite, you marriage would be happier, because that's just how it works. That's not like being a relationship expert. It's literally don't make the mistake and you won't pay the price. And the opposite of making the mistake is that things are pretty good. I'm not gonna do that simply because of the optics. It's not my place to do that. There are plenty of other people that can give good advice.

1:03:40 I don't have anything new to add apart from personal anecdotes, which in this case I'm not going to share because it's about you know somebody's no longer around and doesn't want anything to do with me. So I'm not going to drag them into my stuff. So all I'm going to do for the most part is keep silent about those things. Even though I would be honest if I talked about 'em, I wish that everyone who are participating in all these various discussions would have the same amount of integrity. And it's conflict of interest for me to say that's integrity. You have to decide. Am I trying to sell something? Am I trying to make myself look good? Or am I just giving a tool? You know what I want you to think.

1:04:15 You have to then decide why do I want you to think that? Is it good for you? Is it beneficial? Or am I selling something else? That question should always be in people's minds. And Christians unfortunately are not really good at that because it's judgmental. It's introspecting someone's motives. It's actually thinking about outside of yourself, thinking about the other person and what makes them tick, what makes them do the things they're doing. Not taking everything at face value. The purpose of this episode is you should not be taking things at face value with other people You should be understanding where they're coming from and why. And sometimes maybe that doesn't put them in a very good light.

1:04:54 It doesn't mean they're bad or wrong or guilty of anything, but they should disclose the things that if you knew about them, you take a different approach to how you view the subject. Fundamentally this question is about honest discussions taking place unimpeded and without disruption And when men conceal their motivations, conceal their interests that will necessarily nudge them in one way, the rest of us can't talk freely. The rest of us can't have an honest conversation with the one guy who's vehement and passionate? I mean, like, wow, he really cares about this subject. He doesn't tell you the one thing that matters. He doesn't tell you why he's fighting for it. That conflict should be divulged and everyone should take it into account.

1:05:39 And when a man is conflicted, as Corey was saying, in the case of these discussions, he shouldn't be our participant. Not because he's bad or he's a liar, but because there are plenty of other people who can talk about those things that don't have to choose. Because if the discussion could go either way and a man has a vested interest in it only coming out one way, then suddenly the discussion isn't about ideas anymore. It's about if we decide that this discussion is going to break in this direction, in this man who has competing interests in the opposite direction. We're choosing against him. We're not talking about an idea anymore. We're talking about condemning the guy who's talking. The only way to have those conversations if he's not present at

1:06:18 all. And that sounds heartless, but that's just it's something that's a natural part of of business life and and other things. Sometimes someone just has to leave the room so that something can be discussed because of the conflict. Not because they're bad, not because they're gonna lie or anything, because it's not fair and reasonable for them to be a participant when you're talking about something that could go the wrong way for them. They can speak in their own defense in that context, but they don't get to persuade you without it making clear that they're on the opposite side of the question. And that's what this is all about. This is again one of those things that we do recognize in our civil courts.

1:06:58 We have exceptions to some of our rules that exclude out-of-court statements when those statements are against interest, specifically against the interest of the party making the statement. This is one of those where if you admit to a crime, for instance, out of court, that can typically be admitted. So, if you have made a statement that is against your interest, there is a certain amount of weight that comes along with that that does not come along with a statement that is in your interests. And the reason for that is rather obvious. If you're making a statement that is in your interest, there's a reason for you to make that statement. If you are making a statement that is simply objectively against your

1:07:48 interests, there are many reasons for you not to make that statement. And so the fact that you are willing to say that thing makes it more likely that you believe it is not only true but important enough to be said be said. And so this is one of the heuristics, one of the general rules that you can apply when assessing these sorts of things, when making these wisdom calls. If someone makes a statement that is in his interests, well, there's an obvious reason for him to make that statement. So you have to work that into your calculation. But on the other hand, and in the opposite direction, if he makes a statement that is against his interests, there are reasons for him not to say that, to withhold that information, to remain silent,

1:08:33 and he did not do so. When it comes to the political, which is really what we have been addressing sort of tangentially in much of this episode so far. There are a number of active discussions that are very relevant here. One in particular, that comes up in a number of episodes and is going to be something that is simply ongoing in the political landscape in much of the world, particularly in the West, for the foreseeable future, is the issue of interracial marriage. And that is going to continue to come up because it is a live issue. Immigration, so called, mass migration, all of these problems lead into lead into this particular issue. And obviously in the US context we have the history of slavery

1:09:27 and the Civil War and Emancipation and Integration and all these other things, the decriminalization of interracial marriage, miscegenation, which was illegal in living memory for some individuals, certainly in recent memory, recent history for basically everyone, for those who've studied history. Many of those who speak on this issue do not disclose the stake they have in the conclusion, in the outcome. And so for instance, if say the recriminalization of miscegenation of interracial marriage were on the table, and that is very much something that is legally on the table. That is only, again, very recently, that that was made a non-criminal matter. Not simply illegal, but a criminal matter.

1:10:23 If a man has a wife of another race, and he is discussing this issue, and he does not disclose that he has that personal interest, he is doing that to deceive you. He is being manipulative, at the very least manipulative. That is something that he should disclose. The reason we used, as Wo said, the financial example is that it's very easy to understand, it's quantifiable. If you are acting as a regulator of Apple and you hold ten million dollars in Apple stock and the regulation that is before you, if you pass it, it is going to have the stock value, well you stand to lose five million dollars, give or take? That's a very real, concrete, quantifiable interest that you have in the outcome. That's something we can grasp very easily and understand.

1:11:16 We understand why that man has an incentive to act in a certain way. This isn't quantifiable in the same way, but it is just as concrete If a man has a wife of another race, and what is being discussed is the legal status of that particular kind of union, he has a very real, a very concrete interest in the outcome. And so by and large, he should actually be excluded from the discussion. And the reason that he should be excluded from the discussion is that he Is that he has this concrete interest, and he is going to have to choose, he has a conflict of interest actually, because he is going to have to choose between, as it were, his wife and family on the one hand, and his nation on the other.

1:12:09 Because the issue ultimately when we are speaking of interracial marriage, of miscegenation, is whether or not a given nation continues into the future. This is actually one of those cases where we can look specifically at Scripture, because this is what God did using the Assyrians to the northern kingdom of Israel. This is how he erased the northern ten tribes. The Assyrians, what they would do when they conquered a people, is they would bring in foreigners and they would remove at least a portion of the local population somewhere else within their empire. And then what they would do is basically encourage intermarriage miscegenation, and via that means they would destroy at least the one nation they'd

1:12:54 conquered and probably another one somewhere else in the empire at the same time. This made it easier for them to rule over conquered peoples, because those peoples no longer had a specific identity as a specific nation. There was no longer any cohesion in that population. It was a divide and conquer tactic, very effective, a punishment from God. And so going forward, this is something that is still permissible in Western nations, those Western nations will cease to exist as those nations, as what they were historically. It is a literally existential question. And so those who have this stake in permitting the status quo to continue, or even accelerate, must be excluded from the discussion, because

1:13:46 they have that specific interest. There are two reasons and two ways you can look at this. You exclude them because they have that specific interest, and so there is the chance of them behaving in a mercenary or deceptive or even malicious fashion. But even if you don't have that particular risk, if you set that aside, if the person is engaging in good faith, and I do not deny for a second that there are those who are engaging in good faith, but even if you set that aside, if the man is a good man, he is going to have a conflict of interest, because he will have a desire to see that which is best for his nation, and he will have a desire to see that which is best for his family, and in his specific case those things are in conflict.

1:14:36 And so if he is a good man, you exclude him so as not to make him choose. So that you don't put him in the position of having to choose between his nation or his family. That is a terrible position in which to find oneself. No man wants no good man wants to be in that position. It's one of the reasons that we argue that interracial marriage is deeply unwise. Because it leads to these sorts of outcomes, it leads to situations in which a man has to choose between his wife and his children And his nation. If you're German and you marry a German, there's no conflict of interest, there's no choosing between your nation and your family because they are essentially identical. If you are French and you marry an African, you can very

1:15:25 well have to choose between your family, which is not actually French, and not actually African, but sort of half one and sort of half the other, which forces you to choose, and more saliently forces your children to choose, well now you're in a position where you have to choose between your nation or your family. That is an unwise thing to do to yourself, and it is certainly an unwise thing to do to your children. And those who are of mixed race know this. It's one of the reasons that we have those of mixed race message us and ask us questions. We'll never disclose who those individuals are, of course, but we have received many of those messages and they thank us for speaking honestly on this because they have lived this experience.

1:16:10 And I know some people think, oh, lived experience, it's a Marxist phrase. But as we've mentioned before, it's not, it's a real thing. Lived experience is something. If you work as a coal miner, you have a very different lived experience from someone who works in a law office. These are different things. They give you different perspective, a different sort of concrete knowledge of the world. And those who are of mixed race know for an absolute fact that they have had to choose, or they're still in a position where they're trying to choose, and it's difficult. Because when you are essentially by your nature, torn in multiple directions, that is a terrible position. That is a terrible burden to put on a child, and it

1:16:55 is a difficult choice, because you legitimately have actual interests that are in conflict. It's not that you have one mercy mercenary interest and one legitimate interest, or you have this one that's clearly the stronger interests, and this one's the weaker. You may very well have two virtually identical in terms of weight or importance interests, tearing you in opposite directions. And so the men who have put themselves in that position have to be excluded from the discussion. Because they cannot engage, on the one hand, in a truly objective fashion, or, and perhaps even and on the other hand, you do not want to force them to choose in that way. This is something again that we see all over the place with

1:17:50 regard to this discussion. On X in particular, many of those who decide to attack Stone Choir, attack Woe, attack me, on this issue, well it turns out they have wives of another race. They don't disclose that, at least not explicitly when they're making their arguments. It happens to be something that has been incidentally disclosed at some point in their past. That is a conflict of interest, that is something that absolutely should be disclosed, and those men should not be engaging in the discussion for the reasons we have laid out, for the reasons that I just laid out at some length. This is an important matter. This is something that has to be discussed. Now you can come down on one side or the other, you

1:18:38 can mount whatever argument you want, construct it from scripture, construct it from reason, whatever it happens to be. We've done that elsewhere, in other episodes, we've done it in many places online, we've done it in other discussions. Leaving that aspect of this aside, regardless of where you come down on the issue, it is undeniably an important matter. It is something where it is certainly a matter of wisdom. It is something where there is, I would advance at least, an objectively correct answer, both scripturally and in all of these other ways, biologically, rationally, culturally, whatever else you want to use. And so being such an important issue, we need to have a proper discussion, a proper debate, a proper addressing of the matter that

1:19:33 necessarily excludes those who have this conflict of interest. It's not that we're denying them a seat at the table or saying that these voices don't matter. We're doing it for the reasons that I have laid out, for the reasons we've laid out in this episode, and also elsewhere. Not all men get to speak on all topics. That is simply the reality of life. God has handed out gifts unequally, and certainly that plays into it, but as woe was saying with regard to marriage related matters, there are some topics where it is inappropriate for a man to speak. It's not even because a man doesn't necessarily have something to say on the topic. He may have some very good things to say on the topic. He may know the topic really well, but there is some compelling

1:20:28 reason for him not to speak, to exclude him from speaking. A trivial example of this to make it perhaps more concrete. If you own a Jeep, you don't get to join the VW club. We all recognize that. Straightforward. If you sell your VW, you get kicked out of the VW club. There's a requirement to be in that club. If you don't meet the requirement, you are excluded by virtue of not meeting that requirement. The same thing is true with regard to certain topics of discussion, with regard to certain debates. And so I'm not going to say that Woe and I don't have accurate and useful things to say about some of the concrete day-to-day realities of living a married life. But by and large, we are not going to inject ourselves into

1:21:27 that discussion, because neither one of us is married. And so there's a certain level of not necessarily but seemingly inappropriateness to doing that. There are certain subjects that are more appropriately addressed by those who have that concrete life experience with the thing. And again, as Woe was saying, with regard to the topic of drug use, this is one of the topics that comes up all the time in this area, the other being promiscuity, of course. There are those who use drugs who constantly try to drag others into that life. And so they have this mercenary interest in normalizing their behavior, and obviously the same is very true with regard to promiscuity, particularly with regard to women.

1:22:15 Women who have made terrible life choices will often try to drag other women down to make themselves feel better, to make themselves feel more normal, because if every woman is a harlot, then no woman is a harlot, effectively. But with regard to drug use, there is something more compelling, specifically with regard to the statement against interest, when someone who has made these poor life choices tells you, don't do this, don't be like me. When someone tells you don't be like me, and it is something that is very clearly negative, for instance, losing an eye due to drug use, that is a compelling argument, and it is right to give that additional weight to that. But it is not to say, for instance, that Woe and I

1:23:05 couldn't contribute something on the discussion of drug use, but it is different. Neither one of us has used drugs in the past. Neither one of us use any drugs. Neither one of us uses any drugs. We both drink alcohol. That's the extent of it. Scripture says that's fine, of course. Scripture in fact commands it. We've gone over that in other episodes. I have smoked a handful of cigarettes in my life, woe is not. And so either of us speaking on the topic of drug use is not going to be able to say, Don't be like me. Because if we said don't be like me, that would be telling you to use drugs and that would be an insane argument. We can bring up the research. We can bring up secondhand accounts because both of us have had

1:23:56 friends who have used drugs and some have had very bad experiences with them. But there is a difference, again, because there is something compelling about a man speaking from personal experience and telling you, do not do the things that I have done. They are bad. They will harm you. It doesn't mean that you need someone who has done the bad things in order to have the argument, because of course, we can show you the research on why you should not do hallucinogens. We can mount the scriptural argument, the Christian argument, for why you should not do hallucinogens. We could show you very, very clear medical studies for why you should not do certain hard drugs, because they will literally kill you,

1:24:40 they destroy your body. And those arguments are compelling. And we don't really have a conflict of interest there. There's the minor conflict of interest that we're saying, you know, be like me, but it's not really the argument we're advancing. When I tell you don't do drugs, because you shouldn't, obviously, they're bad for you, I'm not telling you don't do drugs because I want to look normal. Because I haven't done drugs and so I don't want any else to do them. I'm saying don't do them because they're harmful to you. And here are the data showing that that is the case. But on the other hand, the other side of that coin as it were, the habitual drug user who tells you, Oh drug use is fine, you should do drugs, he has a conflict of interest

1:25:29 because he is trying to drag you into that lifestyle. And so you should assess that. That factors into how you weigh his testimony, how you weigh his argument, whether or not you find him to be a credible witness, to speak in the legal terms. Because he has this very clear interest in the outcome. For those who are telling you don't do hard drugs, there's less of an interest in the outcome because by and large, most people don't do hard drugs. And so when someone is advancing that argument, there's no real large scale grander benefit if you do or don't do drugs. Because it remains the norm in society, regardless of what a handful of individuals may or may not do. But on the other hand, again, with regard to the drug user,

1:26:24 the more people who do those drugs, the more likely that becomes totally normal in society, for instance with marijuana. Probably one of the best examples we could give. Marijuana use used to be not only extremely fringe, but very, very negatively perceived in society. It was something done by the fringes of society, by degenerate criminals. One could advance the argument that is still the case. But it's not always these days, because it has become, by and large, normalized among large segments of the population, because those who have used the drug has successfully championed the argument, no, no, this is a totally normal, it's a fine thing. Perhaps that should have been taken With a bit with a bit

1:27:15 larger grain of salt, that these individuals advancing this argument, well perhaps they have some mercenary interest. They have some reason for making the argument they are making, for advancing the things they are advancing. They have a conflict of interests, and perhaps what they're saying should be discounted at the very least, and potentially simply ignored. I won't go into the the depths of it as it were, but this is obviously directly analogous to what has happened with promiscuity in our society since about the sixties. I do want to give you another tool when assessing these matters because there is a specific subset of questions that are different in really in kind, but sort of in degree as well.

1:28:11 It really is difference in kind is what we're getting at here. When dealing with specifically Christian issues and I mean core Christian doctrines on this. I don't mean the color of candles or whatever. I don't care if you use purple, blue candles, pink. Someone will be mad at me because of that. But it that stuff ultimately doesn't matter that much. It's important for good order, it's not essential to salvation. You're not going to hell because you use the wrong candle colour. But when you are assessing Using someone's argument, there is a difference between eternal truth and temporal goods. Someone who has an interest in temporal goods is really the subject we are discussing in this episode.

1:29:02 Because if you have a financial stake in the outcome, or you have an interest with regard to your choice of wife, and therefore your children. These are temporal. Obviously, also, there's an eternal aspect there when you're dealing with human souls, but we're talking about temporal goods for most of these issues. There is a difference when you are speaking about eternal truth. And so, for instance, if you have that conflict of interest with regard to your wife and your children, your financial position, your afterwork activities, whatever it happens to be, that is something that should be factored in and weighed against your arguments because you have that interest in the outcome. You have that interest, that bias in favor of the things that

1:29:53 you are arguing. Again, it doesn't mean that you are necessarily a liar or that you are misleading. It simply means that it factors into the equation in weighing the weight, in figuring out how much weight should be assigned to your argument, to you as a witness. This is not directly equivalent to matters dealing with eternal truth. This comes with a caveat because it has to. There are those who argue for certain positions with regard to religion, specifically Christianity, obviously, because this is a Christian podcast. But there are those who argue for their positions simply due to a mercenary belief, a mercenary adherence to their own team. And so I'll decline to give any specific denomination or tradition as the example

1:30:49 for this one, but if you believe X with regard to the Christian religion, and you believe that X is a core doctrine in the Christian religion. But you believe that because it is what your tradition says, and the only reason for which you are arguing for is because it is part of your tradition. So you're just arguing for team colors, is what I'm saying essentially. This is one of those few places where a sports metaphor is actually important and actually works. If you're arguing for your team because it's your team and not because it's true, that is not what I am saying here. That is a different thing. That is a mercenary approach. That person should still be assessed according to what we're saying in

1:31:33 the rest of this episode, according to wisdom, according to the bias, the conflict of interest. But someone who is arguing for eternal truth, truth for the sake of truth, not because and here I'll give an example, not because we're Lutheran, for instance. We do not argue that baptism saves you. We do not argue for the real presence of Christ in the sacrament because we're Lutheran. If we argued those things because we are Lutheran, that would be biased. That would be a conflict. You should assess that the same way as you would anything else we've discussed in this episode and so many things that we will not discuss in this episode because there are so many examples. But if we are doing it because we firmly believe that it

1:32:24 is eternal truth. That is a different thing. I don't stand, really, in any concrete sense, as it were, to gain or lose anything with regard to you believing what I say about the sacraments. Now, yes, there's the consideration of being a truthful teacher, there's the consideration of the stricter judgment, all these various things. But those considerations aren't a conflict. There's no bias there. Being true to God and his things is different in kind from a financial interest or something similar like that, some again temporal good. And so And so this is another aspect with regard to these Christian arguments, we have to take this into account. If someone is making the mercenary argument, oh well I have a

1:33:13 red flag and so I'm arguing for the red team, that's the same sort of thing as I have a financial stake in Apple, so I'm arguing for Apple. I'm arguing against regulating them. I have a wife who is of another race, and so I'm arguing that we can't possibly make miscegenation illegal again. Whatever it happens to be. But if I'm arguing Baptism now saves you, because it's what Scripture says, it's what I firmly believe. That is not a mercenary argument. That is not bias, that is not conflict That is a fundamentally different thing that is different in kind. And so it's just important to keep that in mind because when we're talking about political issues, that's not really on the table. When we're talking about religious issues, that could very well be on

1:34:00 the table. And so you have to discern, this is again a question of wisdom, you have to discern if that person is making the mercenary argument for his team team or the truly sincere argument for a belief about the central truths of the Christian faith, about the core beliefs of our religion. Because those are two very different things. And you should treat the arguments of the men making those sorts of arguments, of the men taking those sorts of approaches, you should treat them differently because they are not identical. The mercenary argument and the true argument, the convinced argument, are fundamentally different things. And it is only that mercenary argument that would be subject to the sort of analysis that we are making in this episode.

1:34:52 Now, of course, that comes again with a caveat, because this is a matter of wisdom. There's going to be nuance, there's going to be assessments you have to do. We can't give you black and white rules, as we have already said. The man who makes what he believes to be a firmly convinced argument May in fact be deluding himself. You have to make that assessment. That is the case across the board here. There are men who are making arguments that they believe, firmly believe to be the truth, but they have deluded themselves because of their personal stake, because of their bias, because of their interest in the outcome. And so you have to assess whether or not that is the case with regard to a given man on a given subject.

1:35:44 There's no getting away from this fundamental fact that these are questions of wisdom. You are going to have to apply the gifts that God is giving Given you in order to make these calls. We are laying out the framework for how to approach these things. We are laying out the framework for how you determine if certain men are given a seat at the table or not. And then, for those men at the table, how you assess the things they say. But ultimately, this is something each man has to do for himself, with regard to the issues on which he has to make these calls. We can't make these decisions for you. We can't even decide for you how much you trust us. You have to decide that. It's one of the reasons that we constantly tell you to assess

1:36:32 the things we've said. Look at what we've done, look at what we've said, look at Scripture when Scripture is relevant to these things, which is very often the case, of course. You have to make these decisions yourself. We cannot make them for you, and neither can anyone else. Now, of course, there's a difference for our female listeners because, of course, you have a head. He gets to make many of these decisions, and it is incumbent on you to follow him, as Scripture says, submit to your husband in all things as to the Lord. So there's a difference there, but when I am speaking to the men specifically, you really don't have an out. Yes, you can follow the leaders who have been put over you.

1:37:15 Yes, you can trust the men that God has put in offices of rightful authority. But that does not absolve you. Of the necessity of making these sorts of wisdom calls, at least not totally. This is part of the reality of this life. You have to make wisdom calls. You have to make assessments. The point of this episode is to help equip you with the tools you need to assess the testimony of other men, to assess their arguments, to assess the things they say. Because it's not just a matter of the concrete argument itself. Yes, that should often be paramount. In fact, that should probably typically, in the overwhelming majority of cases, be paramount. You assess the argument the man is making. But you also have to assess the man making the argument.

1:38:12 It's the genealogy of ideas, because it's very often the genealogy of ideas. Because the man making the argument is probably making it in a certain way because of his background, because of his interests, because of things that are pertinent to him. It may even be subconscious. Because who and what you are is not entirely a matter of your conscious decisions. We all know that. You're going to use certain words, you're going to use certain constructions Instructions, some of us have accents, there are certain things that are part of you that you cannot avoid. The same thing is true with every other man. And so even if he is making what he firmly believes to be an objective argument, look at the words he's using, look at

1:38:59 the way he's constructing it, look at the presuppositions that went into it, you have to make that wisdom call, on how you assess the argument, and in part that is based on how you assess the man advancing the argument. These things are not unrelated, they're not distinct, they're not disconnected. Human beings are not robots and arguments are not conjured out of thin air. They are constructed and presented by men, and those men have interests, they have biases, they have things in their lives that have led them to those conclusions, that have led them to formulate the arguments and the conclusions in the way that they have. And you as an audience, whether it's here or elsewhere, have to make those assessments for yourself.

1:39:51 I want to present one last example of conflicted interest because it's one that just came up recently on X where a bunch of people got really mad at me for something that I said. And I want to lay out how this is such a clear example of the problems that arise when often people don't even understand their own biases. And if you don't understand that you're missing something, if you think that everything about you is just hunky-dory and you have everything figured out, but you actually have a glaring hole or omission in your knowledge or experience, you're going to make mistakes in the way you convey things that are a natural consequence of what you don't even know you don't have. It's the unknown unknown.

1:40:38 So Jared Taylor recently got back on X. He was banned for years. He is has long been an advocate for whites as a race. He was born in Japan nineteen fifty one. His parents were Christian missionaries there, and he lived there until he was sixteen years old. So he was raised entirely in Japan. Now his family goes back as long as mine, over four hundred years ago. He's a founding stock American. He's an American. The point that I made online was a response to something that he said as soon as he got back on X. He did a video interview with a guy named Richard Hanya or something. He's just a a vile, repulsive, wicked man. One of the nastiest people on the internet. A true enemy of all of us. But no matter what you think of Stone Choir, he hates you.

1:41:27 He is openly an enemy of everything that any anyone remotely on our side would like. Jared went on to talk to him about race and whatever. I didn't listen to the whole thing. I listened to the clip that came out of that where they were both laughing and saying derisive things about West Virginia. And Jared Taylor made a comment about West Virginia people obesity and tattoos and the stereotypical look. And he said that they're not, you know, the the elite human capital that we're talking about. And he went on to explain that despite Richard, the other guys despising of people in West Virginia, Jared's overall point was that well, they're still part of America. They're kind of the lowest tier and they have all these problems,

1:42:15 but I love them and I want to help them. And it wasn't a bad sentiment. And he also wasn't wrong about the problems that people in West Virginia have. The problem that I had with what he said was born of his own biography. He didn't grow up in the U.S., he didn't have an American upbringing. He was brought up by Americans in Japan, eating Japanese food, speaking the Japanese language, living a Japanese lifestyle until he was a basically an adult. That doesn't mean that he's not an American. He has American roots, but it does mean he's less American than me in a very fundamental way. And less American than probably any of you. And this is what made people lose their minds, I would dare say that because he's such a profound advocate for white issues.

1:43:02 Here's what I mean. I've said before that I am also the product of a mixed marriage. My dad is a Yankee going back over four hundred years in the North. My mom is a Tar heel, going back over four hundred years in the South. Both of them are almost all of their families except for my dad's paternal great grandfather, who came over from Germany in eighteen seventy. Everybody else was here before 1776, and three quarters of my ancestors were here by 1650 in both the North and the South. They met in Northeast Ohio, they got married, she moved up there from North Carolina. She was raised in Ash County, which is one of the places that was recently obliterated by that hurricane. I've been there. I visited my grandfather's grave there.

1:43:47 Up on a mountaintop, there's a little family cemetery. My roots go back over three hundred years in Ash County. And yet I was raised in the North. I am functionally a Yankee, but I'm fifty-fifty. Biologically, historically, I'm half and half. I was raised as a northerner. I am a northerner. There's no doubt about that. My mentality, my speech patterns, my experiences are all fundamentally from the North. If I were to go to Ash County, North Carolina, if I were to move there, move to some of the exact same places that my family, my kin, lived for over three centuries in that exact place, I would still be a foreigner there. I would still be an alien. Because I was not raised there. Because both blood and soil count together.

1:44:39 It is not in opposition to each other, but both are necessary. And so what this has to do with conflict of interest is that I am necessarily conflicted as half Yankee and half Confederate, half Southern. Anytime there's an argument between those two sides, I find it disgusting that people are still relitigating the war between the states over a hundred and however many years ago. It's absurd. Yes, it was despicable. It was evil. I could go on for hours about how much I hate what the North did in that circumstance. It was republican. I could convince people who already think they hate the North to hate the North even more after I got done with you. And yet when someone starts screaming about Yankees being terrible people and

1:45:24 the real problem with the world, or someone says what Jared Taylor said, where he was dismissive and derisive and said some nasty things about people in West Virginia, sneering with Richard Hanya, who hates those people. And he was laughing and shucking and driving along with him. It was a chummy moment for them together. The sin that Jared Taylor committed in that is what was mentioned in The Godfather. When Michael Corleone said, Fredo, you're my older brother and I love you, but don't ever take sides with anyone against the family again, ever. That's what Jared did. He took sides against the family. It wasn't that the people in West Virginia don't have serious problems. But you know what?

1:46:06 They're the same problems that poor Americans have in every part of the country. Every time I go grocery shopping, if I go at the wrong time of day, I see people that are just destitute as human beings. I don't simply mean poverty. I mean they're exactly the fat, slovenly people have clearly just not only given up hope on having i what I would consider a dignified life, but they have no concept of it. And this is in New England. This is like the Yankeest Yankee place imaginable, exactly the same type of people that Jared Taylor was despising in West Virginia. And I feel the same way that he does about that. I want the best for those people. I want them to have better lives. And it makes me sad and miserable when I see that that

1:46:54 it seems hopeless. I don't know what I can do to help. The difference between me seeing that and being disgusted by it, and Jared Taylor seeing it and being disgusted by it, is that he got online and he talked about it outside of the family with someone who hates us. Richard Hanya hates those people. And for Jared to side with him and to say, yeah, they're disgusting, but I still love them, that is only something that would have happened because he was raised overseas. He has no notion of the fact that that is an impermissible thing to do in this country, and for anyone to do it in either direction, north or south, there's a conflict of interest that occurs in his case by omission, by having no American upbringing.

1:47:38 He is fundamentally less American because he was raised in Japan, just as I am fundamentally less Southern because I was raised in the North. I can't show up in Ash County and say, Hi, I'm a hillbilly. I'm a tar heel just like all you. I'm here for the hoot nanny. Like it would be obscene. It would be offensive. For me even to say that I'm sure is ticked some people off. I don't even know how to parody that. And it's insulting for me to try because despite the fact that those are my roots and those are my people going back and I do have profound affection for them, I am not of them in the same way as someone who lived there. I can't say that I'm a tar heel. I can't say I'm a southerner, despite that being half of my

1:48:16 heritage. By blood, by history, because I was not raised there. The soil might be in my blood, and it certainly is. The place where I live now looks exactly like where my mom grew up, except that it snows a lot. That's the only difference. And I'm not suited for North Carolina weather. I am very much a northern latitude kind of man. I would never say those things that he said in public, even if I think them, because it's detrimental to the family. It's going against the family for me as an American to despise someone in West Virginia or my neighbor here in New England to despise them because of whatever is wrong with the course of their lives. When I see that at the grocery store, I don't come

1:49:00 home and tweet about it. I don't come home and say you wouldn't believe the disgusting people I saw at the store today. I don't think that. I think it's disgusting, but it's a sense of pity. But I'm not going to use it as an example to score points with people who hate those people because I don't hate them and I know that Jared doesn't fundamentally either, but what he's missing out on is the social rule that you don't do that. If I were to go to Japan, I'd be breaking rules left and right without having any idea. I don't know the culture. I don't know the rules. He would be able to do all sorts of things correctly that I would do incorrectly. I would be a disgusting gaijen by doing a bunch of stuff

1:49:40 that are just wildly inappropriate and I have no idea. I know I'm doing thing wrong. It's ignorance by lacking the experience. The lived experience that Corey talked about earlier. We it comes up occasionally because it's a real thing. I have the lived experience of a Yankee. I can't pretend to be a southerner. That doesn't mean the Southerners aren't American. And so I personally am a living conflict of interest when it comes to North versus South fights, because that's they're all my people. I'm the perfect doppelganger of the globalist plan for the United States. I'm a perfect synthesis of two founding stock families, one from the north, one from the south. And so I don't want to see anybody fight.

1:50:21 And so that's a completely a biased matter for me. It's a complete conflict of interest for me to yell on one hand at people in the South and say, cut it out, quit abusing Yankees and calling them Yankees. It's bizarre. There's not a single person in the North that thinks Yankee. It's such a tell that someone uses that word. It's always a slur. It's never something that's proud. And I feel exactly the same way when Northerners abuse Southerners, saying things like Jared said to Richard, even though most of what he said was true, wasn't the question of whether it was true or false. It was a matter of going against the family. And he doesn't see them as family. I think one of the reasons that Jared has had such a

1:50:59 profound positive effect on much of the discourse is that his unique upbringing in Japan where he was completely alienated, like other than his parents, I would imagine he saw virtually no white people ever. And so he has a particular appreciation for American culture that we're deprived of because we're the fish in the water. We don't know what water is because we just have it. He has lived a life without water growing up. And so he can look and then come here and experience and describe things to us in ways that we just don't even see. That's been very valuable. I'm not bad mouthing the man by pointing out that he went against the family when he said something disgusting to a person who hates those people, who hates our people.

1:51:43 And if you think that West Virginians aren't our people, then I don't know what you're doing. It was obviously a discussion inside America probably tended to fifteen percent of our audiences outside of America. And you know, like it's it's an American podcast. I it's not insulting. I've said before, like whatever you are, be the best you can be. I don't know how to tell anyone else anywhere else how to live. I would never tell the Japanese, here's how to be a better Japanese person. I have no idea. I think it's commendable for them to try, but I wouldn't know where to begin. And it would be obscene for me to try. Because the conflict of interest there would be. I just I got no clue. The conflict is my ignorance.

1:52:19 Jared doesn't know that he has a massive blind spot by not having been raised as an American. It's not a huge insult. The world is full of people who weren't raised as Americans, and there are lots of things about being raised American that make us terrible. We've been misraised. That's so much of what we talk about on Stone Choirs. Like, look, these are generational sins that we're inheriting because of the failures of previous generations to raise the next ones correctly. So when I say he wasn't raised as an American, it's not a glowing endorsement of the way I was raised as a generation. It's just saying that there's something missing. Just like there's something missing for me that I wasn't raised in

1:52:58 Ash County, North Carolina. I couldn't begin to know what that was like. I could read books, I could imagine, but that'd just be it. It'd be imagination. In the absence of direct experience for certain things, sometimes you just have to know to shut up. You know, Corey mentioned earlier that there are a lot of guys who listen to us who are mixed race and we make clear to them when we talk to them personally, and I hope that we make clear online, we don't think they're disgusting. We don't think there's something wrong with them. The their parents made a decision that they're now forced to live with. Just as I am. My northern father married my southern mother, and then when we would visit my southern family, they made it very clear to me that

1:53:36 there was something wrong with me that I was being raised as a Yankee. I heard all this stuff as like a seven and eight year old. I had no idea what was going on. Like I was just going to visit family. We basically had no family nearby. So it was a treat to go down there on very long car rides and then see people and they were adamant that there was something wrong with me because I was a Yankee. I didn't understand it. Like I'm just your family. I don't know what's going on. Like they talk differently, but to me, there was nothing more to it. It was only in the last few years that I understood why they were so concerned and why they were upset about it. They were concerned that their sister's son, their nephew, was being raised

1:54:13 a Yankee. They thought it was disgusting. And they made it clear to me. And in love, like they weren't abusive. It wasn't torment or anything. They were just they wanted me the best that I could possibly be. And they knew that that couldn't happen in the north. That was their view as southerners. So I have lived some small sense of the conflicted life of someone who's mixed race. Not remotely the same. I'm not trying to say I get your suffering. But like even just that one small thing made me feel alienated. I can't imagine what it's like if you could look at me and tell that you're half one thing or half another, that you don't actually belong in a way that everyone else does. That stinks.

1:54:51 And so the reason that Corey and I speak about matters like race mixing is not despising people. It's that we don't want to create an entire generation of people who have that conflict of interest because it's a recipe for war. It's the destruction of the American race, of the American white race that has been here for 400 years, my family on both sides, in the North and the South, equally American. And it's also creating people who have these conflicts. No one should have to live with that conflict. That stinks. It's a violation of the fourth commandment. I'm using the Lutheran lumbering as we always do. You can go to thebookofconquer.org and see the Lutheran numbering for the Ten Commandments.

1:55:33 It's a violation of the fourth commandment for a son or a daughter to despise either his mother or his father over the other. And something the mixed race kids face is something that every divorced kid faces automatically. Whenever two parents get divorced, whatever strengths or weaknesses the father and the mother had within a unified household suddenly become very stark when their two separate households and suddenly the kid maybe he has to choose, maybe he doesn't get to choose, but he's gonna prefer. You always prefer your dad for some things and your mom for other things. That's natural. But we're all human beings. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. When it's under one roof, those preferences can be small and they

1:56:17 don't have to rise to the level of sin. When parents get divorced with kids and those kids suddenly have to choose between their parents, between their households. It's necessarily sinful for the kids to prefer one over the other, because it's always going to lead to some degree of despising. It's a terrible position to put the kids in. Kids who are products of mixed race marriages already have that baked in, even if their parents stay together. Even if they have a happy marriage and happy household and everything, the fact that one parent is one race and the other is the other means that product of that union doesn't have a place, is split in two, just like I'm split in two, only much more seriously, because my differences internally, or at least social, it's cultural,

1:57:01 but it's not racial. When you add race to the mix, not only is it visibly obvious, but it gets that much more difficult because there are qualitative differences between all the races. And qualitative doesn't mean oh amazing and oh terrible. It means people are better at some things than others. You know, if one of your parents is from the Horn of Africa, maybe you're a great long distance runner. Their upsides, not a question to say that their qualitative difference is to say is to say somebody stinks. But a kid who's faced with having a mixed parentage is faced with, well, how do I fit in in the world? And that's a position that we don't want anyone to be put in. And so the reason that so many of these guys reach

1:57:43 out to us and ask for advice is that we don't lie about this stuff. And the advice in the in the counsel we give is always not we hate you or you should hate yourself, but basically you need to pick a direction. If you are fifty percent one thing and fifty percent another, get married, pick a direction. You know, if you have a black mother and a white father, you're in America, I think you should probably marry someone white and your kids are going to be three quarters and their kids are going to be 87.5%, they're probably going to pass for white. And by that point, when they have kids, it's trivia. It's an interesting family bit of trivia. And you don't have to be, it's not the end of the world. It's not the end of your bloodline.

1:58:25 It's just it's a difficult situation that you're gonna have to spend your whole life working through. Sometimes that's what conflicts of interest look like. It's just a difficult situation that's foisted on people that they have to spend their whole lives trying to figure out how to navigate it in a way that's not sinful, in a way that is gonna have the best outcomes for yourself and your family and your own kids down the road. It's hard. it's all a matter of wisdom. It's not necessarily a question of this is sin and that's not sin. The sin in that subject comes in because there are people who actively want to exterminate whites. They want to see no more whites. And the one surefire way to do that is to ensure that

1:59:06 every white person does not marry within their race. And I mean that's what it comes down to. That's sinful, but the rest of it's just a predicament. It's a hard thing. And all the people, all the pastors, all these liars telling these poor young guys, no, there's no sin. There's no problem here. Everything's hunky dory. You're wonderful. It's not a question of wonderful. It's a question of being confused. It's a question of feeling alienated. Jared Taylor felt alienated in Japan when he saw white people probably, because he was used to only seeing J Japanese people. Imagine that situation where apart from your parents, every single face you see is Japanese until you look in the mirror. That's a wild degree of alienation that we can't possibly experience here.

1:59:47 So he has tremendous love for America because he lived there and he came back to where his own parents were from. He has roots here, he belongs here. He's an American, but he's missing something because of his upbringing. And he's missing the understanding that he has a conflict of interest there because his global view of things and his particular affinity for whites, I think one of the things he does well is talking in general, but he also misses the distinction. He never should have said anything nasty about West Virginians or anybody else. He could have very easily picked the underclass in New England and said exactly the same things. But no one ever seems to do that. It's always the South, it's always the people that are described as

2:00:29 trash and garbage in the South to get picked on. I take that personally because those are my people. And at the same time I want the best for him just as he said he did. But I'm not gonna air that dirty laundry in public. Don't go against the family in public. It's just that simple. And when people take that seriously, you're gonna stay out of trouble. I didn't mean to stir up a bunch of crap about it. You only get so much done in 280 characters. But the bottom line is that our upbringing shape each of us, for better or worse. And whatever good things we bring from our childhoods and our experience, our lineage, use it for the benefit of others. Try to help people out. You don't have to be a motivational speaker.

2:01:10 Hopefully you don't lose an eyeball to PCP. But whatever you can share, whether it's good or bad about yourself, bring it to the table. But don't conceal something that gives you a conflict. If you have competing interests, disclose it. And it doesn't need to be a shameful thing. I was like, look, I talk about the fact that half of my family's southern. That's a disclosure of a conflict. But it's also look, I was raised in the north, but these are also my people. It's a mixed race marriage. It very much is. Even though it's the same race, but the cultures are divergent. There's no doubt about that. I'm empathetic to both, but I only possess one of them, and the other one I have an affinity for for historical and family

2:01:54 reasons, but it's not mine immediately. When we recognize these things and we can say them out loud, I think it just makes things a whole lot center. And if you think, oh well, my mom is from the south, so you can't believe anything I say about the south, okay, fine. Or the north, like I get it from both directions, so I understand. Like I've had people despise me on like not many, but it doesn't take anything to set people off on social media to dismiss them. What's unfortunate is that they're never dismissing them for the right reasons. If you think that someone who has both sets of parents going back 400 years has nothing to say about the history of the country. Okay, fine. I'm gonna try to change your mind because it'd be a conflict

2:02:34 of interest for me to do so. To acknowledge these things, to say it out loud, to lay your cards face up on the table and say, This is what I'm working with. Let me tell you what I know and what I've experienced. Put the best light on it, that's fine. But don't hide it. Don't conceal it. Don't try to pretend that it's not there. That's not it's not honest because everyone else is gonna have to work with whatever comes out of your mouth. And if all you do is wave your Bible in the air and scream about racism or whatever, and you conceal the fact that your own family is not the same race as you, you're tricking people. That's not fair. Forget good or evil or any of the laws or anything else. It's not fair to people when you conceal something that's a material

2:03:19 fact. And as soon as someone says, oh, by the way, he's whatever, light bulb comes on. Everyone's like, oh yeah, okay, now it makes sense. Put that on the table first. Everybody listening, everybody talking, put that stuff on the table. It's not shameful. It's just a question of laying out here's what my interests are. I have interests in the north, I have interests in the south, I have interests that are English, and I have interests that are German, whatever it is, it's okay to say that. But then you need to understand that there may be circumstances where you have to be excluded from the conversation because of it. Just for the conversation, not because you're a terrible human being, but

2:03:56 because your inherent bias because of one of those things means that people need to have a conversation without you. And if you trust them to be honest, you're fine leaving the room. You're fine not being in the DM group. You trust these are good guys too. I've said my piece, I can leave, and this is going to turn out fine because these are people who are trying to do their best to. We don't need to horn our way into every conversation and make sure that we get our way. That's fundamentally what honest communication is. Look, here's the best case for this, here the fact, here's my argument, I hope it's of some value to you. That's the way we approach every one of these episodes, and we hope that it's the way people approach a subject of conflicts of

2:04:37 interest, because it's a real problem and it doesn't need to be. With some honesty and some disclosure, these conflicts could be diminished and all we could have to worry about is the interests. I hope that we can have that in the future, but it's gonna take people actually thinking about this and processing it in this way and then just being honest and playing with your cards face up