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Supreme Court & Conversation Therapy, the Manosphere, & Aliens: Religion on the News with Mason Mennenga (#392)
01:26:34
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A
Foreign. Welcome back, everybody to Religion on the Mind. I AM your host, Dr. Dan Koch, licensed therapist. And today, another installment of Religion on the News, which is generally a mix of serious and more light hearted stories. Today they're mostly serious, Pretty serious. But that doesn't mean that we will be serious because joining me on this journey, host of a people's theology podcast. He would love nothing more than to finally just get fired by President Trump so he can transition to a much needed and important new job in the private sector. It's Mason Meninga.
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B
That was a good one, Dan. You were setting me up for that one.
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A
I like that little Pam Bondi. I did have another one and I'm gonna do them both because they're both like really current events. The other one was gonna be joining me on this journey. His ex evangelical takedowns have gone viral so many times that he should be a guest star. On the pit. It's Mason, because, you know, by the time the next one comes out, the pit season will be over. So we will have lost to the, we'll have lost the, the momentum there. The, the pop cultural momentum.
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B
Yeah, I, I get that. Yeah, I, I like those, I like those. We should, you know, every time I'm on this show, you, you should do one of those little, you know, fun zingers.
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A
I don't know if you've been paying attention, but I have been doing one every time that you're on the show.
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B
I, I, I like the bit, I like the bit that you're rolling with.
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A
I also wanted to share one, like what AI thinks of you. Little bit. So I, I recently made the switch from ChatGPT to Claude because of the Pentagon kerfuffle.
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B
Oh, it wasn't because the super bowl ad that you were convinced by?
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A
I actually don't, I didn't watch the super bowl ad. What?
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B
Oh, it was, it, it was like I, there was like a Super bowl ad of it and it was like one of these like kind of feel goody kind of commercials and you're like, what? But it's like not clear what it's trying to advertise.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And it was like at the very end that you find out it's this AI service thing and everybody was like, oh, that's what it is.
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A
Yeah. I heard through osmosis that a lot of the ads were basically AI tech ads.
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B
A lot of AI ads this year.
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A
No, but I, so I switched over and it doesn't know, like all the stuff, you know, it's like, I use it for podcast prep and research as well as, like, just. Just, you know, similar kind of research stuff. I just. I use it in my life, but it doesn't know as much about, like, what we're up to. So it didn't. It didn't really know our relationship. And it added in when I asked it something about you to help me actually to prep for the little. That little joke bit, which I didn't end up using any of what. What it brought me. But I was like, oh, maybe it'll come up with something from, like, your website. And Claude said, quote, mason would be a natural guest for the deconstruction adjacent episodes of the Existential Psychology and Christianity series, though his register is considerably more irreverent than your typical interlocutor. I thought you might like that. Wow.
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B
Wow. It got me. It got me. I feel a little exposed right now.
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A
It's not. It's not wrong. It's not wrong.
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B
Yeah, I like that. I like that. You know, there was this thing that happened on Twitter the other day where I posted a thing or whatever, and a lot of people got mad. And I don't know if I saw this because it was me or if this was something that generally other people on Twitter could have seen, but I went to, like, kind of that Explore page on Twitter where you can see, like, highlights that are happening on Twitter of, like, tweets that have, you know, whatever. And it had, like, I went to that Explore page and it had one of my tweets, and it had this whole, like, Grok summary of it. And this Grok summary said, like, Mason Menega, who posts frequently on Twitter and also is a seminary student or whatever. But I was like. So I was, like, shocked by the fact that, like, it had this weird little summary of what happened about this specific tweet, but I was a little, like, thrown off by the fact that it still thinks I'm a seminary student. But that's. You know, I can't blame CROC for that.
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A
You got to update all your metadata on your site and whatever bullshit. By the way, very brave of you to continue calling it Twitter. Thank you for your ongoing resistance.
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B
I love dead naming it. So
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A
the only type of dead naming that is acceptable on the left, if you don't know dead naming, is when you call a trans person by their old name. That is what that refers to. For those who are out of the loop on that. Okay, well, we do have, like, some kind of heavier stuff, I guess. The first story is the heaviest. We have three kind of Stories on the docket today in order the Supreme Court overturning of a Colorado law that banned conversion therapy for, you know, basically same sex sexual orientation. That has been getting quite a bit of attention and ink. And it's, you know, it's directly relevant to my work as a therapist. I don't engage in conversion therapy. We'll talk about. It'll be clear why I don't when we talk about it. But I do have a lot of queer clients, especially queer clients coming out of, you know, more conservative religious backgrounds, some of whom over the years have a past of conversion therapy that's also been relevant for past guests of this podcast at least one or two occasions. And yeah, so I thought it would make sense to talk about that. And I also want to. So I talk about the Supreme Court decision and kind of what that might mean. But I thought that also might be a good excuse to talk about conversion therapy. I've never done like a episode on it, so I prepared a little bit about that. And maybe I figure you'll have some follow ups, Mason, and we can just sort of kick that around a bit. Then we are going to talk a little bit about some of the manosphere stuff that's been coming up more recently. There is that, Is it Louis Thoreau? How do you pronounce his name? I didn't.
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B
I think that's what it is. Yeah.
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A
Louis Thoreau. I think he's a. He's British, right?
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B
Yeah.
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Kind of a documentary filmmaker, interviewer guy who did a Netflix documentary called Inside the Manosphere that has been really big on Netflix. And it's kind of calling attention in a specific way to some of the sort of issues with boys and men that I do like to cover on this show. And I got some requests to watch that documentary. I haven't. It came out right as I was going on a little short vacation and I just. That didn't sound like a good.
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B
That's not your.
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The way I wanted to spend my time.
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B
That's not your easy watching.
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We'll see. I may do some more episodes kind of about that stuff, but you have watched it and read some articles and so you'll be taking the lead there. And then finally, as promised in the previous Generation Gap culture hour with Tony and Josh, they were less interested in talking about this kind of recent resurgent in aliens talk coming from current and former presidents of the United States. So we'll talk a little bit about the alien stuff. I have a. I have a theory I'd like to run by you and get kind of where you're at on that. So that's the game plan. Anything, any sort of low hanging fruit or smaller items that you wanted to get to. Before we jump into the Supreme Court
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B
decision, the only low hanging fruit right now is how low of Brian Gnome's breasts are. The only reason why I'm bringing it
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A
up is like low hanging watermelon.
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B
Yeah, very, very low hanging watermelon. The only reason why I bring it up, obviously it's crazy. It's a ridiculous. And also, like, I have a personal, like, I know the gnome family. I used to work out with Brian and you know, my best friend Cullen. Like, that was Kristi Noem was Cullen's Sunday school teacher. So like, I'm very much in that, like, I. It's just like, it's a fascinating story right now given the fact that, like, I know the gnome. Like, it's not like we're super close. But you know, if I were to like go up to Christy or Brian, Brian might recognize me. But Christy, probably if I like told her my last name, she would be able to identify, like at least my parents or whatever. Like, that's kind of the closeness of small town South Dakota.
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A
All right, so March 31st. So as this, this will come out on Monday. So would have been last week when you're hearing this. The Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 that Colorado's law banning conversion therapy for minors for LGBTQ minors violates the First Amendment. It was brought by Kaylee Childs and a Christian counselor in Colorado Springs, surprise, surprise, who argued the law unconstitutionally restricted her speech based on viewpoint. Writing for the majority, Justice Gorsuch concluded that basically the lower courts had failed to apply sufficiently rigorous First Amendment scrutiny. So the, the Supreme Court said, yeah, this is a speech issue, this is a freedom of speech issue, but it's not a 6 to 3, 5 to 4, kind of along party lines decision. It's an 8 to 1 decision. So two liberal justices, Kagan and Sotomayor joined in. And Kagan wrote separately in her own concurrence that the problem here is viewpoint discrimination. Because Colorado suppressed one side of a debate while aiding the other. The constitutional issue, as far as she's concerned, is straightforward. So I do kind of want to any. Any like, what are your kind of basic responses to this story when you read it? Like, where did your mind go first?
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B
Yeah, there's two things that come up right away for me. One is there have been other states that have tried or have banned conversion therapy. So my first like, sort of reflection on this was what does this mean for other states? In fact, Minnesota, where I live, is one of those states that a couple years ago banned conversion therapy. Governor Walz signed a law that banned it, or at least specifically for youth. I don't know about adults, but specifically for youth it was banned. So I'm curious about that, like how this will affect other states. The second thing is, and maybe we want to dive into this because you're a psychologist and because this obviously is
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almost a psychologist not to. Yeah, almost. Anyways, a doctor of psychology.
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B
A doctor in psychology. Because you're in that world. I'm curious what your thoughts are as somebody who's in the psychology world. Like, how do you see psychology as a First Amendment right? Like, do you see the work of psychology, even if it's psychology that you disagree with? Like, I would imagine you disagree with, like the psychology of conversion therapy? Do you still see that as like a First Amendment thing, as a, you know, as one who does psychology? So I'm just curious, like about that part of it that, that came up for me right away because clearly they're like, really hinging this argument as a First Amendment thing, which I'm just curious how, like, psychologists or people who work in psychology think of their work as a First Amendment type of work.
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A
Yeah, that, that is really kind of the most interesting aspect of it. I think, generally speaking, you know, I don't, I don't sit here thinking of the talk therapy that I do every week with clients as like protected political speech. That's not, that's not like, generally how I think of is using language and human conversation toward, you know, the improvement of mental health and overall human flourishing is kind of how I would, you know, if I had to. That's like a top of the head, you know, off the top of my head sort of description of what it, what it is. To me, however, I think it's. I think it's messy. Right. Justice Kagan actually presented a sort of counter argument or a flip side of the coin example. She said, imagine Texas bans gender affirming talk therapy for minors. Right. Says you cannot use any talk therapy to help a teenager think through whether they might be trans. Right now, I don't, I wouldn't want that. Right? Like that, that would be. Okay. So that, then that makes me think, all right, I gotta, I gotta take a step back here and think where, where does therapy cease becoming speech and where does it become sort of medicine? And I think that, I mean, my sort of top Takeaway is. Unfortunately, that's blurry. It's not like. And I think if I had a legal background, I might have kind of a clearer personal way of thinking about that. I don't have any sort of legal background training, but that counterexample of like, well, here's what a conservative state might choose to do. Like, on its face. That's a compelling argument to me. I want to talk a little bit about the different techniques that are used in conversion therapy, and that actually might kind of clarify where some of it is more like speech and some of it is definitely not like speech. And, you know, so let's do that maybe, and then that. See what you think about that. So basically, starting from the most extreme and going backwards there is shocking. I wrote it down as Shocking Boners. So you. There's a term for it.
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B
I'm just imagining what your porn blockers are. You know, like, if you had. If you had. What is it called? Covenant Eyes. What's Covenant Eyes? Covenant Eyes right now for on your computer.
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Yeah, it doesn't catch my speech. Covenant Eyes also has a. Real. Real protections around speech. So there's this. You can measure male arousal with a plethysmograph. I might be saying that wrong. And basically. So this is not really done anymore. This. This kind of stopped about 50 years ago. But this is sort of the most extreme version. As you get the boner, you get shocked. And so it's supposed to, like, you do this on purpose to sort of train your brain. So most conversion therapy, maybe all of it is based on, or the techniques are based on classical conditioning of one sort or another. So you pair a stimulus with a response, or you try and unpair a stimulus with a response. You know, Pavlov's Dog is the oldest example that most people know of this kind of a thing. It's really kind of getting under the hood and trying to, you know, use these deep psychological levers towards some particular end. Right. So shocking the boners not really done anymore. That's the. That's the wildest. Physical deprivation and restraint. Sometimes this is used in, like, residential programs. You. You would use sleep deprivation, food restriction, or isolation as sort of levers to try and get the mind to associate something negatively. Also kind of rarely used. Generally seen as, you know, ethically problematic. Now we get a little bit. Okay, so now we're talking about using classical conditioning. There's five, by the way. So this is third. The third least insane. Aversion conditioning. So you can do the electric shock, not just on the, with the boner comes, but you could do it paired with homoerotic stimuli. So you can have the client look at images or consciously engage in a fantasy and then you shock them, you know, for similar reason that the, the other example, the boner shock. There's also a chemical version where you give nausea inducing drugs that you have them take that while presenting them with, you know, same sex erotic material again, to get the brain to associate this stuff. And there's smell aversion. So using ammonia capsules, things like that, sort of similar mechanism here. Now, one thing I wanted to say actually before this, that also makes this complicated is some of these techniques are still used for people who want to get rid of pedophilic disorder. So there are individuals who experience attraction to minors like pedophilia and who don't want to. And so not all of these techniques are like never used. And ethically we kind of think about using them toward pedophilia different because that's like protecting innocent, you know, third parties. So that factors into the ethics. But it's an, it's an area where legislating this stuff, if you wanted to say, oh, we just can do no aversion therapy. Well, do you really, you want it to be illegal to do aversion therapy for someone trying to get rid of pedophilia? So it's like, you know, it's just another area where the, the clinical stuff is cleaner than the legal questions are. Right. Okay, then going down the ladder, number four, what we call shame and satiation techniques. So you can do masturbatory reconditioning. So the client is instructed to, right at the moment of orgasm, switch the fantasy content, you know, from like thinking of men to thinking of women. And then to continue with that imagery of women or thoughts of women through the refractory period as you're coming down. And that's when your brain is releasing the oxytocin and you kind of have like, Mason, I know you've never orgasmed, but what happens is for the rest of us is afterwards there's this nice few minute period of happy chemicals. So the idea is to try and pair that with images of women or ideas of women. Right. Flip these around. If it's a woman who's doing conversion therapy to be attracted to men, there's also some public or social humiliation stuff. You can kind of do some shame aversion here. And then finally, the most used now and the least problematic clinically, but still problematic, depending on what you're talking about. Is covert sensitization. So this is just in the mind, you know, so you're, you're, you have your client. I don't even like to, I don't want to put a first person in this. They would have their client vividly imagining same sex scenarios and then to pair them mentally with imagined aversive scenes. Vomiting, humiliation, being socially rejected, this kind of a thing. And this is considered covert because there's no physical stimuli. So it's like, it's kind of, it's using some of the same mechanisms that like CBT uses this kind of a thing. Although it, you know, that's doing a little bit of work. It's kind of the same anyway. So those are sort of the five buckets, how it's actually done and has been done in the past. Obviously some of it more common now than it used to be. So how does that like getting the lay of the land, how does that help you understand what's going on here? What does it bring up for you?
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B
Well, that's super helpful to know, like there's sort of this more maybe clinical way of that people have done conversion therapy. My understanding of conversion therapy typically has been sort of the exodus international version where you get like a, a group of men, for example, together. And it's a lot of group therapy and it's a lot of like trying to make men men kind of thing. Like I, I, I know other people have gone through conversion therapy and they try to get them into like sports and, and trying to get them into doing man things, Quote, unquote, man things. And, and, and from my understanding, they also would go through a lot of like childhood trauma because there was a lot of assumption in that world that childhood trauma is the reason why so many men are gay, for example. And so they would try to get through that. So this is just maybe different. I'm not to say that's not to say like maybe there were these types of practices and techniques that were used or methods that were used in organizations like Exodus International. But this is all sort of new to me that I wasn't aware that there were these types of methods that were used in conversion therapy.
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A
I think the methods that I described are more the impetus for the laws that are trying to keep this from happening.
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B
Right.
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A
I'll just briefly on that trauma angle. 25 years ago even it was clinically defensible to say, for a psychologist to say. I think a lot of homosexuality is caused by childhood trauma around gender or whatever. It's much less defensible. Now, because more research has been done, and that just does not really appear to be. It's not a major factor like it. If you come up with a scenario, you can find some people for whom it seems to apply, but there's not a lot of evidence for that view. And, you know, there's like, we have a lot more twin studies and things like this that show, like, separated twins raised differently with the same genetic material. You have something like a 50% chance of having the same, you know, orientation that I'm pulling the number out but of my head, off the top of my head. But it's something like somewhere between a quarter and 50% of the variance in sexual orientation is explained by genetics. So that's not a hundred percent. There's no, like, gay gene that we're gonna find. But that's a. That's a pretty high percentage. You know, like, we. We do that same sort of research for various, you know, psychological conditions. You know, like bipolar and autism are like, highly genetic type of a thing, and other issues are less genetic. Right. So you sort of. It's one of the things you're looking at for all kinds of. All kinds of issues. So we've got better information now. So the trauma thing. But, like, imagine someone goes to some conversion therapy, and all they do is process their trauma from childhood. And let's say that the conversion part doesn't work, but, like, maybe they're like, that was good. I processed my trauma right. You know, like. Like that. It's a mixed bag if you're. If you're just doing that. And this is what the sort of count the therapist in Colorado and her legal team are arguing is like, you can't police all of this speech if it's just talking. But. Yeah, but again, like, you're kind of asking me about it. It's not like I don't think of the talk therapy that way, but I'm open to sort of getting my mind around it in a different way for legal reasons, which is just not. I'm not trained to think legally. That's not.
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B
Well, one thing that I saw, again, like, the Supreme Court is making this a free. Like a speech issue, like a freedom of speech issue. And even like the state of Colorado, I think I saw something where they're making it or the way that they're framing it is this is a public health issue.
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Right.
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And so that's like another. Again, they're trying to sort of make it more into this, like, medical. This medicine kind of issue that this is. This is obviously public health. And while obviously the Supreme Court thinks of it or as at least framing it as a speech issue. And so it's just, again, it's like one of these things where obviously the Supreme Court, with the authority that they have, they sort of get the ultimate sort of framing of it. But it is interesting. Just the way it's framed really probably changes your perception on whether this should be legal. Regardless of whether you think, whether you think conversion therapy is good or not, that's a separate thing. But the legality of it, it really probably is dependent on whether you frame it as a health issue versus a speech issue.
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A
Well, yeah. Is a therapist using speech? I mean, basically, I think what they would say is two things are happening at the same time. This is what I understand the Supreme Court, to understand it as a therapist is both doing a sort of mental health procedure using speech, but they're doing it using speech that is protected by the Constitution and the first Amendment. So I think like what I'm. It's tricky. I don't know that there is a way to get the perfect law because of this, you know, gray area between what is medicine and what is protected speech. You know, if you, if there is a medical procedure, you know, a certain type of surgery that used to be common, that now there's really good evidence across a lot of journal studies and literature reviews that it causes more harm than good in the average case, then you can't do that anymore. And then if you found a doctor still doing these old, you know, like bleeding someone with leeches, you would be like, hey, that's malpractice and you can get sued for that.
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B
Right.
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A
But bleeding someone with leeches does not involve any speech. So like, and some of these techniques, they all involve some speech, but sort of the, the less talk heavy they are. I think laws can be written about specific techniques. Right. So you could make for instance, something like the shock therapy illegal, specifically that. Right. But it, it is a much bigger legal ask to make it illegal to talk about whether a 17 year old who experiences herself as gay wants to be gay or not. And another complication here is that the, the modern practice of therapy is really heavy on client autonomy. So yeah, you could worry about the therapist kind of putting his or her own worldview onto the client. But in a lot of these cases, it's the client who doesn't want to be gay. And I don't, you know, when I'm working with a client, I will. Well, I don't have those clients. Let's just be clear. They don't, they don't come to me if they, you know, like they can tell that I'm not the therapist for that. Plus I'm in Washington state and there's just not a lot of demand for that here. But there are, I bet there are therapists, you know, north of Bellingham in Linden, which is a conservative, that they have clients who experience, you know what they would say I have same sex attraction, I don't want to have it. And that's a part of their religious beliefs. And religion is also protected by the Constitution. So it is tough. It's like my hope sort of long term for the laws is that we may not be able to write the perfect law around purely talk therapy approaches. That may just be the cost of having the First Amendment, but I think we could, there could be laws that identify specific procedures that are closer to medical procedures in their, you know, like if you do this, here's what we know about the evidence base and we can talk briefly if you want, about the evidence base for this stuff. And you know, the evidence is pretty bad for conversion therapy, but there are some meaningful issues with the evidence that make it a little less cut and dry than we'd like it to be. I don't know if you want to go there, but you know what I'm saying, they might be able to do laws around procedures, but to the extent that it's talking, it's going to be difficult in the U.S. yeah, I can
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B
see that sort of, that's the double edged sword of the First Amendment.
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A
Right.
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B
That's just kind of, that's what you get when. But as much as we gain from it, that's the sort of thing that you have to give. Yeah, I just found it interesting that that was sort of the framing of it and I can hear from like what you're saying that from the more talk kind of therapy side they're recognizing it as that. But yeah, like you said, it sounds like based on what you're saying, maybe just like the lawsuit was maybe poorly designed. Like maybe if they would have the
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A
lawsuit, the law was poorly written.
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B
Yeah, if the law. Yeah, if the law would have been something along the lines of more, the more sort of procedural kind of. If that had more abandon of that kind of thing than the talk therapy, maybe maybe we wouldn't have seen it even get to the Supreme Court. Or maybe the Supreme Court would have actually sided with Colorado on that then.
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A
Yeah, I think that's. That seems to be like from the analysis I've read that the justices are like, leaving open, you could write different kinds of laws here. But if you're going to write it this way, it's not controversial to us. There is too much protected speech involved in the way that conversion therapy is being defined by the law. And so they're like, sorry, we have freedom of religion and we have freedom of speech. So. Briefly, let's talk about the evidence. So there is not any credible evidence of efficacy of conversion therapy. Like the question here, the question is, do these methods, including talk all the way up to shocking the boners, does it work? Right. So that's a question. Cause as therapists, we are not pastors, we are not morality police. Many therapists would make a case, and you can make a strong case that, like, if your client is saying, look, what I really want is to get rid of my attraction to men because I want to stay married to my wife and that would make my life better. Your job is not, generally speaking, to be like, no, you don't, you know, like, clients have autonomy and sometimes a client is gonna want to do something that you don't think is necessarily a good idea. In some cases, you have to refer them out to someone else if you can't sort of in good conscience do the work. But generally we don't trample our client's autonomy. And one reason for that is a deep kind of psychological truth. I would like to get your take on this. Sometimes we have to try and fail at something to actually learn the long term lasting lesson that we need. Right. I mean, can you think of examples of that in your life?
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B
Oh, yeah, certainly. Yeah. There's things like, you know, and I think that's just generally even like a good parent allows a kid to maybe make a mistake or two, you know, to maybe touch that thing that's probably going to burn you a little bit so that you learn not to ever do that again, you know? So I think, I think that's just like kind of part of being human, as we often learn from our mistakes, even if it feels like really serious mistakes.
- [32:17]
A
There can even be a harm reduction angle. Like, so say you do have a married gay man with kids and stuff. You know, there's a real kind of, let's try this first and then that second argument for like, let's see if we could get you to, you know, like, like, I would not take that client. Right. Just to be clear. But like, if that client could, if there was some wiggle room, you know, I don't, I don't have a black and white, all or nothing view of sexual orientation. Some people maybe, maybe he's actually bi. Right. Maybe there's a way to sort of help bring that out. Again, not a, not an area of practice I am moving toward. But look, in theory, that's not insane. And if that could be done then, then that might align with that client's other values. I want to stay married. I want to keep a, like, I want to keep the marriage together for my children. I love my wife. I have a lot of fun with her. I respect her. I do sometimes find her attractive, you know, whatever, like, like, okay, so you might try that before you try getting divorced. And, and like finding a man to be with. There could be, there could be cases where that would be reasonable and it would be potentially problematic to have that be like in practice illegal or in any case illegal. Now this client has no way of trying that out. And maybe that client needs to try it and then go, you know what? It didn't work. And in so doing I learned this about myself. And now I much more confidently am willing to say I think we have to get divorced. But they can do it having, telling themselves that they tried everything that they could and that might be tremendously meaningful even if it didn't work. Right. So it's just, it's just complex. There's just a, there's a lot of sort of competing values, ethical values, competing goods here in some of the fringe cases. But I think laws could be written that could get rid of the most egregious forms at a minimum, so that there's not a lot of evidence for efficacy. There was a big Spitzer article, this one article that seemed to show like self reported progress among clients who wanted to reduce same sex attraction. But actually that study was disavowed by its own author in 2012. And the issues with that also plague some of the other side research, which is there's not a lot of good evidence about that, doesn't have some potential sampling bias. So you've got studies on the other side that recruit from like therapy interested individuals, which is a, which is not sort of the average person. That's not the gold standard for the kind of study you want to do, but there is evidence, consistent evidence of harm. So most of what we see is like significant rises in depression, anxiety, ptsd, suicidality and social isolation. That's from a Stanford led study of 4,000 participants and a 2024 systematic review finding like, hey, we do have pretty good evidence that these things produce harm. Right. And what. So, but again, there's still a little bit of methodological problems with that. Even the APA says that there's no study of, quote, adequate scientific rigor that has been designed to assess some of this stuff and the safety of it. So there is a kind of a lack of clarity there, which I don't know, I suppose also might cause the justices to lean into the speech issue because there isn't like a sort of overwhelming clarity in the literature. I think we might be able to get to that, but we need more studies and maybe this will spur more and careful research and it can be going forward.
- [36:18]
B
Yeah. So a couple of thoughts. One is, when you were talking about this potential hypothetical case study, when you're talking about it or the way you describe it to me, doesn't sound like you were kind of maybe talking about it or framing it in a way where this could potentially be seen as conversion therapy. And from my understanding of people who have gone through conversion therapy, that's not how they would have experienced conversion therapy. Like, conversion therapy has almost always in their experience been, okay, you experience same sex attraction. We need to make you not same sex attracted and not try to do this like sort of nuanced thing of let's try to save the marriage, or maybe you want to try to save your marriage, but there's kind of this like imposing of you feel same sexual attraction, you don't want to, and we're trying to make you either straight or just not simply experiencing same sex attraction. Not trying to do this like nuanced thing of maybe you're bi instead. Like, that sort of thing. Doesn't seem like that has been the experience of a lot of people who have gone through comparison therapy. Does that make sense?
- [37:23]
A
It does make sense. The difference there though is so let's say it's Exodus International, so a lot of teenagers were sent there by their parents kind of against their will. That would not qualify for what I'm talking about. But some people who went to Exodus International went there on their own will. They're like, I don't want to be gay, so I'm going to try this. And I would say that just psychologically we're talking about the same thing. We're talking about reducing the amount and sort of like frequency and power of same sex attraction, sexual attraction. So it. That's the thing you have to outlaw or not. You know you can't. Right. You know you can't write it. So it's like, well, if they want to be there, but not if they don't want to be. You know, like, that's a different law, you know, that. Or that's a different ethical principle. So I think that the problem is legally, if you can come up with cases and you know, we're talking, I'm talking about a married man, I'm not talking about a minor.
- [38:25]
B
Right, right.
- [38:25]
A
Like in my hypothetical minors, I mean, if minors are tough, because on the one hand you want to, you have a greater sort of ethical need to protect them than adults because they have less, you know, decisional power and more, they're more fragile. They, you know, harm is we, we think of it differently. On the other hand, they are at a different developmental stage where sometimes, like teenagers especially sometimes have to learn by trying things and failing at them. And telling a teenager this won't work means fucking nothing to them in a lot of cases. And so you could, like, you could see someone making the argument that like, well, if it's just talking, and again, it would have to just be talking, like, is that always bad that they have a chance to sort of play that tape out and see what happens and, and maybe find out through painful experience that it didn't work. And, and you know, you don't wish that on anybody. But sometimes that is the most effective way forward for the long run. So it's, you know, all these things get, make it, they make it complex legally, especially, just, just to be clear, like it's not, it's not clinically unclear. For me, I would not treat a client who is trying to remove their same sex attraction. I think I would, I've never, no one's ever asked me to do that. I think I would not be comfortable doing it at all. But I would certainly be willing to have some conversations about it with any client. And like, if that was illegal, that would be weird too.
- [40:09]
B
Right?
- [40:09]
A
Right, right. Like we can't even, we can't even discuss it, you know, like that's, that's. Now I'm kind of like, maybe I like those free, free speech protections, you know?
- [40:19]
B
Yeah, that makes sense. One thing I'm curious about, as you were talking about all of this too, is, and maybe these things already exist, but are there ways instead of maybe outright banning something like conversion therapy, are there ways dissuade the public from conversion therapy? So for example, and again, maybe they already do this, but could licensing boards, like, you know, the board that would license therapists, could they just say, we will not license somebody who practices conversion therapy. And maybe that already exists. Could something like that or maybe even, like, I'm thinking almost kind of like the attorneys general kind of message thing where they have it on, like, tobacco products of. Is there a way to sort of have people know if you're wanting to do conversion therapy? Here is the evidence that we have that largely this does not work, or something along those lines. Like, are there ways that you think states or groups can maybe dissuade people from conversion therapy without outright painting it?
- [41:18]
A
Yeah, my reasoning here is pretty similar in terms of there are some blurry lines. I'm sure that some states will try to have any conversion therapy whatsoever be, you know, sort of grounds for having your license challenged. That might run into the same kind of legal issues that this law ran into. I think, again, if I'm a licensing board, I'm probably thinking, let's figure out the specific interventions and related interventions that we are most confident are harmful and that. And if we can point to evidence that like, you know, like, the APA has official guidelines on this stuff. And so if you can point to something like that, then you can make an argument that you're not able to keep a license in this state if you engage in X, Y or Z. So versions of that are already done. There are, you know, older forms of therapy that you're not allowed to do anymore. And so you could maybe update some of this stuff in various states, but you can always have someone who's like, all right, I'm going to practice unlicensed. I'm going to be a coach.
- [42:26]
B
Right, right.
- [42:27]
A
You know, and then they're beyond the license boards, you know, beyond their power. And they might be able to have plenty of clients who are like, I don't care. I'll go to you as a coach. I want conversion therapy.
- [42:38]
B
Right, right.
- [42:39]
A
So, yeah, there are still ways around that.
- [42:41]
B
Yeah. But it would be something where you'd almost have to, like, force them to go, like. Cause I would imagine, like, if somebody unlikely that changes insurance, things that just changes different dynamics that probably, you know, if we. We have the reason why we have these sort of licensing. Why we have licensing is for the sort of authority so that, you know, it's something that insurance is able to recognize, like, this is a legitimate practice or whatever. This is legitimate medicine or whatever. And. And so if you force them out of that, then it just, you. It forces you to have to do something maybe a little different. Just in the same way where if you want to have a box of cigarettes, you're now going to have to see this big, giant label on it.
- [43:18]
A
Yeah.
- [43:18]
B
And even though you still might choose to engage in that, you still have to look at that thing and. And know that. That that's there.
- [43:26]
A
But you can't force a coach to put that on their website, you know, so there's. But yeah, there's. You know, whereas you can force any retailer who sells cigarettes, it has to have the label, you know, or the producers of the cigarettes, they have to put it on legally. So there are. And, you know, when you get. When it comes to psychology also, it's like, well, if you try and convince someone of something, that often backfires. So it's just. It's just complicated. You know, it's like there's a lot of good intentions on every side here. And that doesn't mean that the best approach is taken just because people want what's best for others. It's just. It is just very complex. Why don't we move on to the something that's totally not complex at all, you know, whatever's going on with men these days.
- [44:15]
B
Yeah. So I know we belabored our points about conversion therapy, but. Yeah, so I watched this documentary, Inside the Manosphere, and I definitely think there's some religion angles that I found interesting. Maybe you have kind of your own psychology angles that you want to talk about as. And I know you haven't watched the documentary, but I'm sure you're aware of the kind of people that are in the sort of manosphere, red pill community or whatever. But. Yeah, so one of the religion angles that came up to mind as I was watching it is one of the men. I forget his name now. He was like, this redheaded dude that lives in Miami. He consistently would brag about that he was married, but also, like, they had an open marriage, but his wife was not allowed to see anyone else. It was just him, you know, it's just.
- [44:59]
A
Jeez.
- [44:59]
B
Yeah, it's that kind of world, right? Like. And what was interesting, right, so here's this guy who's like, my wife is not allowed to have sex with other men, but I'm allowed to have sex with whoever I want. And. And he. There's this clip. It's just a really brief clip. It's not even talked about, but I just see this clip and I just immediately recognize this face. He is getting interviewed by a very famous Catholic influencer, Michael Knowles. And I would imagine. I would imagine Michael Knowles is not a supporter of this guy's lifestyle. At the same time, he's platforming this man. And I just found that Just really fascinating that even though these men would maybe disagree on this sort of lifestyle, of this man being able to have sex with however many women he wants to, there is so much commonality around the sort of way that they think about men and patriarchy and all of that, that they're like, yeah, we, we can, like, we can, we can connect on that. And that, to me, was fascinating. I didn't listen to their full interview or anything like that, but the fact that he would even have him on his podcast, that Michael Knowles would have this guy on his podcast despite their clear disagreement on this particular issue, I just found that fascinating. Like, and I think back to, like, even 20, 30 years ago, I couldn't imagine a Franklin Graham or a Jerry Falwell having any sort of relationship with a man that brags about how many women that he's having sex with. Like, I. I just. It's so interesting how, like, that conservative Christian influencer culture is now getting muddled up with people that are just clearly not the kind of Christians that they are. And obviously we saw that with Trump in 2016 and 2015. So I don't know, I just found that really interesting that the way that this documentary made me rethink how, or maybe not even rethink, but maybe confirm that a lot of the conservative Christian culture and their influencers are just absolutely open to any sort of, sort of celebrity or influence from other conservatives, even if they clearly disagree with them on some significant things, they just are willing to compromise in a way that I would have never expected the conservative Christian world to compromise. And again, I feel like it was clearly marked when they were totally willing to support Trump. And it's just like this is further confirmation of that.
- [47:26]
A
It seems like, yeah, it definitely seems to be in the same spirit. Right. Of like, the kinds of things we never would have saw coming giving our upbringing in that world. But there's a lot of, yeah, enemy of my enemy is my friend type of thing going on. I think there is maybe. And we could dig a little deeper there and say they are afraid of the same things, perhaps.
- [47:56]
B
Yeah.
- [47:57]
A
So, you know, and obviously can't speak to the motivations of Mike. Mike Knowles, Is that his name?
- [48:04]
B
Yeah, Michael Knowles, something like that.
- [48:06]
A
I can't speak to his motivations. I don't know. But, you know, it reminds me of sort of right wing support for Putin. Right. It's like on sort of cultural grounds, like, he's fighting against the decaying influence of. Of sexual progressivism. And, you know, all this kind of a Thing. So it's like, yeah, if. If. If your ultimate fear is sort of a progressive takeover of culture that is going to erode all of the foundations that keep it healthy, then first of all, that kind of panic is powerful and might really kind of get your hackles up. It might get you real afraid. And in that fear, you might be a little less discerning about who your bedfellows are. Plus, there could just be, like, everybody who does sort of public work and has other people on as a guest. Part of their motivation is they want the people who follow that guest to follow them. So if this guy's popular, then maybe some of his followers become Michael Knowles followers. And he might tell himself, for instance. And again, I'm not saying he would. That he is, but he might tell himself, well, then they'll get a better. Something better from me than they're getting from this guy. Maybe I can help them. And maybe. And also maybe that's a justification, you know?
- [49:39]
B
Yeah, it seems, I would imagine, just how this world typically works is, you know, if you're somebody who follows this sexually promiscuous guy or whatever, and he's all about just trying to make as much money and have as much power as possible. I would imagine, like, if you're a follower of that guy, the whole Christian shtick of, you know, just being faithful to your one woman, and that your actual ultimate calling is not to make as much money as possible, but to actually follow Jesus. Like, if that's actually what Michael Knowles is talking about, and I would hope so, then I can't imagine that somebody's gonna be overly convinced by that. But it might, like, who knows? There have been obviously plenty of people who maybe were in that world for a while, that sort of chauvinistic world, and then ended up in the throes of conservative Christianity. And we've seen plenty of people like that over the last number of years of these celebrity men that have gone into, or at least supposedly have converted to Christianity. So, anyway, I just found that really interesting. Just that. Yeah. That there was this connection that they were trying to make.
- [50:45]
A
Here's an angle for you I'd like to get, you know, keeping it religious, religion focused, in part, whatever the resurgence is. And I know there's some disagreement about how big of a resurgence to traditional religion is there among men in the west right now. But I think Ryan Burge would say it has at least leveled off the decline, if not risen. I think what he would say is maybe women are still leaving and the graph is going down for women, but it's maybe ticking up a bit for men. And maybe the net is a kind of equal, or maybe there is kind of a rise, a slight rise in religiosity. But so we know that there's something going on for enough men that it's showing up in the data. One explanation that I have for the draw of traditional religion for these men is a sort of like, anything's better than nothing in a vacuum. Which is not to say that I don't mean to sort of overly weight that and say that traditional religion doesn't have things to offer man. I think it obviously does. Traditional religion is very popular for some very good reasons. But one thing that I think, if you're especially younger, a younger man in that phase where you are trying to figure out who am I? You know, you're developmentally in a place of like, who am I? Who am I compared to my family, who am I compared to my peers? Who am I compared to older people? What am I looking to, you know, like, who are my role models? Like When I was 16, 17, my role models were like, on the one hand, C.S. lewis, and on the other hand, you know, Joey Ramon or something like, you know, like those were kind of the things I was looking at. And there's a naturalness to that. But I do feel like popular culture and you know, tell me if you disagree. My sense is that popular culture has not given, has not presented all that many sort of, you know, successful, well known, you know, healthy visions of masculinity that are close enough to traditional masculinity that like media tends to, you know, highlight basically men who are more androgynous or more just like really in touch with their feelings, you know, therapized sort of therapy graduated men. You know, you still have sports and stuff like that where just kind of brought. You still have UFC and things like this where, where a lot of men go for their free time and their leisure activities, where that kind of traditional stuff is still prized. But like, in terms of like, what should I build my life on? I mean, isn't there in part just a vacuum problem? What do you think about that?
- [54:00]
B
Yeah, I've actually had this whole conversation with my therapist as well, and we often talk about like, what are the sort of leaders or the popular figures of what we would maybe describe as like healthy masculinity, whatever that means. Right. And there just isn't a lot of that. And you know, actually, honestly, like, one of the spaces that I've encountered that And I've heard other people talk about that is, you know, we're both very involved in the homebrew Christianity world. And every time that we go to the theology beer camp, you know, there's the jokes about how male dominated dominated it is. But I also think about, like, yes, it is that. And also, like, what if that's actually a space for, like, men to enjoy beer, have cigars, and talk about nerdy things like theology and Tolkien? Right. Like, what if that's like, actually a really healthy version of masculinity? And, like, we need to, like, support spaces like that as much as possible because the alternative is clearly, and especially for a lot of younger men, they're going into these more toxic spaces. And it's because those toxic spaces are giving them a sense of purpose. And so, yeah, I often think about that of, like, as much as we can maybe, like, make fun of ourselves for how, like, white and male a place like the algae beer camp is, like, what if it's also, like, really important for white men to have a space where they can be a healthy version of their male selves?
- [55:26]
A
Yeah. I think that you could also make a case for the kind of trad wife, the sort of flip side of this coin of. And it's not as, I think the numbers are smaller because it's. Or it's being offset by more kind of progressive women leaving religion. But I do think the kind of, broadly speaking, the progressive vision around gender is much more represented in culturally elite institutions than a traditional, you know, view of gender. Just meaning, like, yeah, like the. Like to the point where if you make an argument about biological differences between men and women on, let's say, a New York Times opinion podcast, like the Ezra Klein show or something, you have to give a bunch of caveats before you can even say it. Listen to Ezra do this right? And what that tells me is that his audience expects that the norm here is that we are beyond all this gender binary bullshit. We have graduated to recognize that all, or at least most of that is socially determined and is not baked in. And I don't think that's true. I think some of it, certainly some of it, social culture is extremely powerful. And one way of thinking of culture is it's all the minds of the individuals of that group sort of addressing certain questions as a group and coming to certain consensus. And our minds are very powerful. And the collected minds of, you know, multiple people together are even more powerful on certain questions. So, yeah, it's like, I mean, the simple way to say it is sort of echo chamber bubble language, right. That we media has allowed us to live in our own silos. And somebody saying, you know, these, these traits, traditionally masculine, feminine, have some basis in biology at a bell curve distribution type of a level. The fact that that needs a bunch of caveats means that we, you know, people that they, that they have become conditioned to expect a certain kind of language from the people that they listen to. Right. That is in the sort of bubble, like. And that. I probably took too long to say that.
- [58:14]
B
Yeah, no, I, I, I can, I can totally see that. Where, yeah, there's that I, I do think to some degree, and whether we think this is right or not, there is a expectation to sort of be apologetic, like, to be a man. And I think that's maybe, maybe what you're maybe alluding to around, like, you know, qualifying all these different things. Like, there's almost a sort of like, God darn it, like, I'm a, I'm a white guy, and I've got, like, just simply based on that alone, like, there's all you sort of have to like, apologize about. And that's not to say that that shouldn't be maybe the case. Like, maybe there are reasons that that should be the case, but it is to say, like, there are a lot of men growing up in that culture where they're especially young men that are having that sort of expectation. And because of that, there's sort of this lost sense of, like, like, I don't know what I am then, like, there's a lost sense of identity, therefore lost sense of purpose. And, and certainly what this manosphere is doing is they're getting into the eyes and ears of young kids, young boys, and giving them that sort of sense of purpose. And a lot of it is this sense of purpose, of you need to be big and strong or whatever as a man, and you need to be doing all these man things. And also part of it is the sort of negative thing that they're trying to like. And this is what we're up against. We're up against the feminists, we're up against the Muslims, we're up against the trans people. So there's this sort of, like, we're gonna give you the sense of purp of these are the things you need to aspire to be as a man of having a lot of power, money, wealth, as many girls as you can be with, be as attractive as you can. And also these are the things we're against. And that just gives a lot of young Boys purpose. And that's why I think many of them are getting sort of. I mean, I think you can argue getting radicalized in those circles.
- [60:02]
A
I think thinking of it developmentally is helpful too. So when I was a teenager, I was really drawn to punk rock and anything sort of punk adjacent. And punk rock is, by its very nature, a kind of an adolescent pursuit. It says, you fucking suburban squares, you know, go in and work in Your day jobs 9 to 5, 40 hours a week till you die. You know, piss off, right? Like, we. We want freedom. We want artistic expression. We want, you know, whatever you say I am, that's what I'm not, right? There's a kind of just like a part of the punk spirit is just that that's not all of it. There's other stuff in the sort of, like, do it yourself movement that is,
- [60:53]
B
you know, Straight Edge.
- [60:54]
A
Really interesting. Yeah. I mean, Straight Edge has its own sort of stuff going on. DIY has its own stuff there. There's sort of, you know, led to community development type stuff. Like, there's. There are good things to point to, and then there's like, really silly shit to point to. And it still moves me in my 40s, but it doesn't move me the same way as it did when I was 16. And some of what's going on, especially with young people, is like, young people are gonna try on stupid ideas like that is like, we have to sort of be willing to have a little bit of room for that, because if we don't, we will just be let down because they will do that to some degree. And I think it's. I'd rather take it as a challenge to present, like, better options for when they flame out of that kind of a thing, especially if they're young. And. Yeah, I just. I guess I just want more, kind of a greater variety of male archetypes and role models of, you know, with more thoughtfulness and maturity behind them to be able to compete. But I think we should recognize that, like, there will always be a competition there and some of the ideas will be stupid, just like they've always been, especially for young people. And, yeah, I don't know, maybe that. That's kind of. I would like to go. And I know that the Thoreau documentary, like, he's really focusing on a bit more of the fringe characters and sort some of these, like, kind of wilder influencers. I get why that makes for a more entertaining documentary. It's more newsworthy. I'm. I'm just sort of less interested in that stuff. I, I'm more interested in the kind of quieter, kind of core questions around this stuff and, and what options we are giving to young people and, and, and, and like young adults or, or men who are thinking about starting families and sort of transitioning to that next phase of life. And what can they look toward for a pattern? You know, therapists all know that having patterns for things, having models for things is extremely important. If you have a, you know, if you have a client who like every time they get into an argument with their significant other, you know, it blows up into a, a nuclear blast, you know, one of the questions you're going to ask, like one of the first few questions you're going to ask is how did you see these conflicts get resolved when you were younger? What models did you have? And that just means models are important. That's how like, you know, or, you know, here we go, get into Gerard territory. You know, humans are mimetic creatures. We see other humans do stuff and we go, I want to do that. My two year old wants to do everything my six year old does. Kids are sort of the clearest example of this. And whatever he sees his brother do, by default, he wants to do it. And there's a few exceptions, but not very many. Right. So models matter. And so I think we need to say, wow, these are awful models. And if we say that, we need to also say, I'm willing to accept less awful models that nonetheless give an ideologically diverse set of options for young people. And I should not expect that. Billy Wilder on the streets. What's that? What's that Billy? Not, not Wilder. That's the old director Billy. It's not Eilish. He, he's like a flamboyantly gay comedian. Oh, I think you know what I'm talking about. What's his last name?
- [64:35]
B
Is he the one, he's not the one that like does the street interviews like on one of the late night shows, is he?
- [64:40]
A
Yes.
- [64:41]
B
Oh, I know who you're talking about. I don't know the last name though.
- [64:45]
A
Here we go. Billy Eichner.
- [64:49]
B
Oh, yeah, yeah.
- [64:49]
A
So like Billy Eichner. Billy on the street is his show or whatever, you know, he. But like he's like, you know, he's like a funny, like, very overtly flamboyant gay comedian. I just can't expect that a 14 year old farmer is going to be like, Billy Eichner is my guy. Right? No, like that guy need. That kid needs somebody else. Right. And I'm also glad that Like a gay kid, a 14 year old farmer, who is realizing that he's gay and doesn't fit in with anybody, that he could have Billy Eichner as a role model. That's great. I want a thousand poppies to bloom, basically, is what I'm saying.
- [65:29]
B
Mm. Yeah. I think where, like, the concern, at least with this documentary is these fringe people, as much as they might be fringe in some ways, they do have some level of influence. It's not like they're. There's a reason why they're on the documentary. And I think the concern is some of these maybe more or less fringe people are. Have very deeply concerning beliefs about themselves, other men, women, other people. And so that's like, where it's like, okay, yes, it might be great if there's like some other straight man for that straight farmer kid to have an idol to look towards. But maybe like not one of these guys on the documentary kind of thing.
- [66:06]
A
No, not one of those guys, of course. But what I'm saying is I think if we think the guys on the doc are problematic, then we need to also not say, and only people who are left of center can count. You know what I mean? Like, no, no, we have to be open to more than that.
- [66:22]
B
Yeah.
- [66:23]
A
Okay. As promised. Alien talk. So Obama was on this show and he's like, aliens are real. And it led to like all this kerfuffle, this hubbub. Trump sort of jumped on it as a, you know, my guess is a way to distract from the Epstein files and perhaps the Iran war. I guess it was before. Maybe it was right before Iran was attacked. But then Obama comes back on and he clarifies. I meant they're out there, you know, like there's billions of galaxies, billions of planets. Mathematically, it's near certainty. But no, we don't have remains, you know, that I know about. Like, they didn't tell me if they've got this stuff. I want to get your take. Have we talked about aliens before, Mason?
- [67:11]
B
No, but I have so many thoughts.
- [67:13]
A
Okay, well, let me give you the floor for a minute. Go for it.
- [67:18]
B
Yeah. So I want to be very clear. I have lots of thoughts on aliens. Typically, the people that have thoughts on aliens are like that meme of that guy who, you know, it's like it's all aliens and he's just crazy looking. I want to be very clear. There is the conspiratorial world of aliens, right? Like that. That is a world that exists. I think that's an entry point for a Lot of people. And it's interesting, it's fascinating and I don't believe almost any of it. Then there is an actual world of scientists that are called astrobiologists. And that is the world that I, I literally am reading so much on this right now. I watch like, listen to every podcast of an astrobiologist, any sort of YouTube video that comes up of astrobiology. It's fascinating. And it, and that world to me is way more fascinating at this point because it's actual scientific, like people using scientific methods to try to figure out the even just simply the possibility for life on other planets and galaxies. It's just, it's like just fascinating like all the different fields that exist within it. And so anyway, I just want to be very clear. I am in like the astrobiology world that I find very, very fascinating. In fact, there are astrobiologists that are hired by NASA. So it's not like some, again, it's not a conspiracy. There are people who are trying to study and trying to, to learn about what the possibility and if there is life on other planets. And so I just find all of it really interesting. So astrobiology highly recommend it if you have not looked into it.
- [68:49]
A
Okay. As I understand it. And here's a little sort of Gemini summary. So astrobiology uses, it's multidisciplinary, so they're combining biology, astronomy, geology and chemistry to ask questions about like habitability and water. Like what, what's the relationship? Like do we need, does a planet need water to have life? This sort of organic compounds of life from a chemical perspective, how widely are the building blocks for that distributed? So could they be combined on other planets in a similar way that they've been combined here? You know, carbon is carbon the only form of organic life or whatever, you know, evolution and sort of like the chemistry of evolution, they look at these sort of extreme life forms that exist on Earth, like those shrimp that are right near the heat vet, volcanic heat vents that can live in like, you know, 300 degree water, Celsius, you know, you know, things like this. And then they look for techno or biological signatures in things like, you know, the seti, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, those big satellites and stuff. So I agree with you, I'm interested in all that stuff, in fact, that the, the presence of that world is a part of my argument against. The more it's being covered up.
- [70:17]
B
Yes, I agree.
- [70:17]
A
Okay, so can I give you my, can I give you my, my pitch? Okay, so when you press someone like a Tom DeLonge or a couple friends of mine who are sort of in this world about like, yeah, the government knows, they're aware of this secret tech. They're aware of these materials that they can't identify. And the uap, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon, the data, the camera stuff we've got, the Navy pilot footage, this all says that they're here now. They're, they're here, they've been here before. Somebody knows about it and for whatever reason, they're not sharing. Maybe because they think it would cause a panic, maybe because they want to use the tech to make their own money or something. You can give different kind of reasons for it. My argument does not say that that's definitely false. But what my argument says is it is not worth our time. So you could engage in that speculation. My argument would place it at the level of I like making playlists, you know, like, great, make playlists, go with God, have fun. But it's not going to sort of like, I'm not going to find out anything true about the world through making and organizing many playlists, right? And here's why. So if that technology exists, if they've been here, we do have seti, we have massive satellites. We have the entire astrobiology community that you mentioned. I don't know if you've met any of these guys at like American Academy of Religion who. These are like biologists and philosophers and, you know, people who are involved in that work who really wants to find evidence of other life in the universe. You basically have to think that all of those people are lying, first of all, right? Because, well, we do spend like a billion dollars on this every year and they're not coming up with much. So is that you have to think maybe that's all a front or something. But I've met some of these guys, they don't know it's a front. So I suppose that's possible. But here's the real argument. If another civilization has the kind of technology that allows them to see us without our detecting them. You know, I saw in a video where Tom delong described that he believed they have a way of bending space time to essentially teleport through a wormhole wherever they want to go, so we don't have to be able to see them coming, they can like do this without us getting any obvious indication that they're here. Sort of irrefutable, you know, like in a sci fi movie. There's the ship hanging in the sky. Everybody sees it, right? They, they have a way of doing it undetected. Because on a evolutionary timeline, they are probably millions of years ahead of us, right? This is the idea, okay? Now, I don't, in principle that's possible. I don't know how you would say for sure that that's not the case. Because if that is their technology, then we don't know, right? Like, you know, it's, it's a. I don't think it's a great argument, but, like, if you say, well, that's how they do it, well, how are you going to disprove that? But here's what you can say. If that's true, then how long have they been watching? And it is weird to think, oh, they've only been watching since the 1940s, right? Like, if they have that level of technology, if they are millions of years ahead of us, if they can travel through wormholes and all that shit, then they've probably been watching since the beginning, not the beginning of the universe, but like at least 200,000 years since humanity emerged. They, you know, maybe they wanted Homo sapiens to succeed over Neanderthals and Denisovans or something like that. I mean, you could argue if you want to say, the cave painting, you know, some of that weird fringe evidence. Like if you think, oh, that's evidence that, like, aliens, you know, had some hand in human culture. Okay, let's just say for a minute that that's true. What are the chances that in the Next, the remaining 40 or 50 years of my life I will be able to say anything at all definitive about this civilization of people? The only way is if they choose to break their probably 4 million year cone of silence and let us know. And what reason do I have to think that they will do that while I'm alive? I basically have no reason. You could say, well, nuclear war, well, we've had the bomb now for 80 years and that hasn't been enough for them. Okay, maybe it's AI. Maybe I would think the bomb would be a good enough reason, we could blow ourselves up entirely. That would be the time to let us know, help us unite for world peace or something. So I just think there's not really a good answer to that. And really the answer is this stuff is fun and interesting to think about and to which I say, great. Make playlists, you know, dig into your hobby. Great.
- [75:39]
B
What's interesting is there are like, there's a whole field within astrobiology, and I'm not sure if it's like a more human science, anthropology kind of thing or whatever, but one of their questions Is, is it even possible for another civilization to exist long enough that it doesn't destroy itself first before it can even, you know, go to another planet?
- [76:04]
A
Yeah, that's.
- [76:04]
B
Or another galaxy. Like that's a huge question. Is like, at least as of right now, like all we know is about ourselves right now is the most complex organisms in the solar, in the universe. And there's a really good chance that we'll never even get to the point where we're going to other galaxies because we're probably going to destroy ourselves first. And so the question, it begs the question, can another civilization of another kind of organism in another galaxy even also get to that point without destroying itself first? And so I think a good reason, a good explanation for why we have yet to encounter at least another organism to, you know, enter our solar system or even enter our planet is the fact that like, maybe it's just not even possible for another organism, organism to exist and evolve that long enough before it becomes self destructive to itself.
- [76:55]
A
Yeah, that's an interesting argument. I think you could still say with enough possibilities, let's say there are 2 million human like intelligent civilizations that, or species that will form across the universe over a billion year period or something, maybe five of them could get to that level. All you really need to do is get to another planet. Right. It would be tough to wipe yourself out on multiple planets. That's a pretty good. Sort of like the way that oceans help protect a country from war. You know, if you have an ocean between you that, you know, that tends to buffer you from a lot of things. The one other thing I wanted to highlight this, this other guy who came on, I can't remember, I should have looked it up the, the, another podcast, but he was like, look, if it's true, like the, the, the two basic possibilities here for some of the UAP phenomenon or, or you know, items are I, well, there's, there's sort of three, there's aliens, number one. Number two is technology that the US government is aware of and is testing or is aware that someone else is testing and they're not talking about it. There's all kinds of things that the military and government does not share with the public. And then the third is it's stuff that the government does not know about, but that they can assume are other actors, other nations, or maybe advanced terrorist groups or even hobbyists who have access to money and technology. And what this guy said was, if it's aliens, it's kind of weird that the place that they would choose to show up consistently time and time again is right around United States military bases. Like why, you know, and yet if you say it's the, if you say it's the third option, the second, you know, the, any version of the ones we know about, the ones we don't know about. Right. Well, there's a strong reason because the United States military bases are the seat of worldly power in the, on Earth. And so if you are, you know, trying to figure shit out and you're another country or a group or even an individual, like you might, you might show up around there and it is weird. Like if aliens are as advanced as Tom DeLonge of Blink 182 and to the Stars Academy says that they are, then they shouldn't give a shit about San Diego Air Force Base, like it just wouldn't. Or naval base. Like it just. Why would that be the thing for them? Right? Like they don't need to defeat us or something like that. Not if they can bend space time so that, that only makes sense if they are like roughly equivalent to us. But if that's the case, then the entire seti, all these legitimate scientists and professors and nerds, they all are in on the conspiracy, which I just find completely impossible to believe. Yeah. So that, that's the. I think that's a pretty good counter argument.
- [80:00]
B
Yeah, no, I think it's a, it's a great counter argument. It'd be hilarious if they only like ever showed up to like Kazakhstan. Just like the Kazakhstan military base. They're just, they're just putting them back at five o' clock with the world leaders of Kazakhstan. It would be hilarious.
- [80:15]
A
We've chosen to reveal ourselves exclusively to the nation of Monaco.
- [80:21]
B
They just love Monaco so much. Here's what I will say that is fascinating is almost every astrobiologist that I've read listened to that gets this question asked. Not to say everyone gets this question asked. But it does seem as if with almost near certainty, the ones that get asked this question, they believe with almost near certainty that we will find some sort of form of alien life in the next 50 years, like some X amount of years.
- [80:52]
A
Just because our detection is getting better.
- [80:56]
B
The detection and it is almost becoming more and more clear that other planets have the type of like habitable type of conditions for life and have the. Again, like the, the what we know is necessary for life. There's just so many of them that exist, whether in our solar system or outside.
- [81:16]
A
That's what Obama is talking about, right? That's what Obama was saying he's like the. It just seems like from the experts that he was briefed by when he was president, like, yeah, there's mathematically, it seems almost a certainty there are. But there, there are such long distances that. That's the question is what you know, that that makes contact less certain.
- [81:42]
B
Yes, contact will be less certain. And it's also like it's going to be like. And it's going to be like a bacteria. Like it's going to be something that isn't visible by the naked eye. It's going to be like so disappointing, I think, for the public when they don't see some sort of green alien humanoid looking figure. Like it's just not going to be that. But it's almost with near certainty that we will find something in again like X amount of decades, like five decades or something.
- [82:06]
A
Yeah, I don't know about the time scale there, but. But yeah, that's okay. Well, I think we did it. We solved the, we solved religion and the news.
- [82:15]
B
That's. That's what I'm here for. That's. That's why they pay me the big bucks, Dave.
- [82:21]
A
If you want more Mason, you can listen to a people's theology. Or if you want to hear Mason talk about rock music, you can listen to the Black Sheep podcast, which is
- [82:29]
B
way more interesting than me ever talking about religion, to be honest.
- [82:31]
A
And I've only been a guest on one of those too, so that might also, you know, that tells you what
- [82:37]
B
I think about your religion opinions.
- [82:39]
A
Yeah, exactly. My theological opinions. All right, thanks, Mason. We'll have you back soon.
- [82:46]
B
You're the best, Dan.
- [82:47]
A
Peace, Sam.