Andrew on the Canadian Atheist Program

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Andrew Rappaport Introduces the Canadian Atheist Interview

Hey, this is Andrew Rapport. I'm at the Cruciform Conference. And, uh, so at the time of this recording. But what I want to give to you today is I was on an atheist program called the Canadian Atheist.

And this was an episode I did with a Canadian Atheist. And what ended up transpiring, and there's going to be some things we're going to talk about foul language. Why did we talk about that? Why, because of the fact that what ends up happening with this guy is he's going to, he's been on Apologex Live several times if you listen to it.

And this guy is going to make a case when he, we talk about foul language that they're just words. Now on Apologex Live he talks about the fact that words and everything were just chemical reactions. Wait for that part of the exchange because you're going to see a guy who says they're just words.

And he's suddenly going to say that words have no meaning, no morality. And he's unbeknownst to him going to fall into a trap and argue that words have morality. That's going to be a problem in his world view.

So check out this episode where I was on the Canadian Atheist. Today on The Rap Report.

Welcome to The Rap Report with your host, Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of striving for eternity and the Christian podcast community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Opening Banter and Guest Introduction

All right, here we go. Welcome to CA. Today is, what is today? Today is Wednesday, October the 20th, 2020. I am Michael. Dean is not here. He's tied up in my basement. He was a bad boy. But luckily, as I posted about on Facebook earlier, we have a guest with us.

This has been a long time in the making. I first reached out to our guest tonight months and months ago. But he's incredibly busy. But we're really, I'll keep saying we, Dean's not here. We're really happy that he was able to join us tonight.

We're going to have a discussion. He has been gracious enough to host me three times on his YouTube show. And when last we spoke, November the 5th, I'll be going back again to celebrate a Democratic presidential win.

And, well, at least that's my hope anyway. But, so joining us today is the host of Striving for Eternity Ministries and the co-host of the Apologetics Live YouTube channel. We're going to talk a lot about that as we get through it.

But now, Andrew Rappaport.

Welcome to the Canadian Atheist. You see here, first thing I have to do is come in and correct an atheist right off the bat. Today is Tuesday. Today's Tuesday? What did I say? You said it was Wednesday.

Oh, really? Oh, yeah. You know what it is? I was looking at my calendar before we got started. And I have a mountain of stuff I'm doing yesterday, so I had Wednesday in my brain. So, yeah, it is Tuesday.

Did I say episode 122? This is episode 122.

Well, thanks for having me. It has been a pleasure having you on. I know that it has been a long time in the making, as you said. I forget when you first reached out to me. I can't even think about it until after the summer.

It was probably June.

Because you had gone on to Skyler Fiction's channel. And I saw that episode on Skyler's channel. And I was like, this seems like a really cool cat. I want to chat with him. So, just before we get too much into this, everyone listening to this will notice that the dulcet tones of my wife's intro have been edited because, of course, Andrew is a Christian.

And so, I will be clean as well this episode, out of respect. Don't worry, I've got another episode all ready to go with Dean where I'll swear up a streak again. But I have not been replaced. I'm not a doppelganger.

It's really Michael. But, yeah, out of respect for our guest, I won't be swearing tonight. So, okay. There's a lot to talk about. But anyway, I first reached out to you in June after that. And it was like, get back to me after the summer.

So, around mid-August, I sent you an email. And you're like, I'm still tied up. I'm like, okay. And I tried not to take it personally. And then finally, it was maybe, what, six weeks ago? You had said, hey, we're going live tonight.

Why don't you come on our show? And I did.

And it was a lot of fun. And you never got on. Actually, the first time you came in, and you had to leave. Because we do, Apologetics Live is every Thursday night. So, it kind of makes it, you know, it's open to anybody.

Anyone can come in and ask any challenging questions. Or, you know, whatever they want to talk about. And we had Anthony Svester. Dr. Svester was speaking with someone else, if I remember correctly. On Evolution.

Yes. And so, because he had set that up, we were like, alright, we'll go for a while. You were sitting there the whole time. And I'm like texting, going, hey, there's a guy, Michael. Make sure he gets in.

And by the time we were ready to bring you in, you had to go. So, we said, okay, we'll bring you in first thing next week.

Yeah, that's right. My memory isn't what it used to be. And I think I hung around for about an hour and 15 minutes or so. And then I'm watching the clock and looking at my phone. Because that's how I have my alarm set.

And I'm like, man, I'm going to be a zombie if I don't go to bed. So, but, you know, it was great. And like I said, the next, and then I was on for, what, three weeks straight. And it's been really good.

We've had a lot of interesting discussions. So, everyone, just so you're aware, Andrew, I posted links to all of my appearances on Unapologetics Live. And I got back some interesting comments and emails from some of our listeners from as far away as Australia.

And it was interesting. One of the comments was, is this really Michael? He's not swearing. So, that's why I kind of joked about that. When we started just a couple minutes ago. But it's been great. So, why don't we get into what we're going to talk about today.

So, one of the things that I like to do is, unlike a lot of atheists who have podcasts, I have no problem at all giving a forum to, like to you or to anybody else, to reach our audience. Everyone else is aware.

They've heard me say this a million times, but I'll say it for you as well. We got super lucky really early on. I met Armin Navabi, who's the founder of the Atheist Republic Facebook page. I met him at a little conference called Imagine No Religion, which was usually held in BC.

But three years ago, it was held in, three and four years now, it was held in Toronto. And I met Armin there. And he was gracious enough to come on the podcast. And then he blasted it out to his worldwide audience.

And we benefited from that. So, we now get regular downloads from over 100 countries. And so, when I say I got emails from people from Australia, that was, I think, technically the farthest away, because it's on the other side of the world.

But we get a lot of comments from all over the place, and we're really fortunate in that way. And I like giving our guests access to that audience to say, here, tell your story, tell your side of things.

And we can chat about it. So, that was the first thing I want to talk about, is your story. Because you're not originally Christian. That is true.

Andrew's Jewish Background and Conversion to Christianity

Let's dive into that. Yeah, my background is, I was raised Jewish. I've kind of, in my family, we've gone through basically, if you understand anything of Judaism, we went through all this major denominations, if you want to call it that, for ease of understanding.

But from Orthodox to Conservative to Reformed, they just, you know, each one is more liberal than the next. So, but I was raised Jewish in a Jewish home, Bar Mitzvahed, you know, what, like 8 to 10 years of Hebrew school, where, you know, I'd be, I'd go after school for, you know, several hours, three days a week, and then on Saturdays, especially as you get ready for Bar Mitzvah.

So, I was actually raised, and this will, you know, shock some people, but anyone that's Jewish will understand, I was, you know, generation after the Holocaust, I was raised to believe that Jesus Christ is Hitler's God.

So, I was never looking for Christ. And to explain why that is, is just like many non-Jewish people, Gentiles, wouldn't understand Judaism, they think everyone wears a kippah, they don't, you know, they don't understand the different divisions and fractions within Judaism.

Well, the same is true for Jewish people with Christians. All the Christians are just Catholic. And the Catholic Church supported Hitler, and because of that, you know, this was the perception that we would have, is that that's Hitler's God, that's who he worshipped.

And so, I wasn't looking in any way to become a Christian at all. It really, and I don't know if you and I talked about this at all on Apologetics Live, but really what it was, it was logic, mathematics that got me to realize that the New Testament had to have been supernaturally written, because you looked at prophecies, the guy who was explaining this to me, you know, basically I wrote it off.

I was like, all right, let's examine this. Doing calculations in my head of trying to figure things that he was giving as prophecy, there's some things that are self-fulfilling, right? Anyone knowing the prophecy can make that happen.

But there's prophecies that I put in the category of coincidence, and those were the ones I was interested in. And it basically got beyond what's called statistical impossibility, 10 to the 48th power, to have all those prophecies happen by coincidence.

So I didn't believe in Christ, I just believed the New Testament and the Old Testament had to be written by someone that was supernatural. So then I started to ask, okay, what does the New Testament teach?

Really the sticking point for me was the resurrection, because dead people don't rise, right? 100 Yeah. And so that was the issue that I had, because for me, anyone that knew me when I was a child, there was no question whether I was a sinful child.

Tried to burn my house down twice, once we put it out with a fire extinguisher, the second time, fire department. So, you know, I guess I got better in my sin. But no, I was a wicked kid, and a terror for my parents, unfortunately.

But the thing that ended up happening was, I never was looking or thinking that I was going to be accountable to anybody for that. And so I wasn't looking for a savior of any kind. But then again, I didn't see myself as needing one.

I thought that basically my Judaism saved me, because that's what we were raised to believe. But I could not explain away the resurrection. If you do any study on the views of the resurrection, there's a lot of different views.

Maybe they got the wrong tomb, maybe he didn't fully die, different things. I have one that, as far as I know, is still original with me. My last argument was to say to this guy Chuck, I said, maybe the disciples dug a hole underneath the tomb, pulled the body out, and he was like, in three days, they don't have heavy equipment.

And so I could not explain away the resurrection. So if Christ rose from the dead,.

I was there to dig the core through stone.

He said, there's not heavy equipment, they can't do it in three days. So that was the final argument I had. And I said, if Christ rose from the dead, then that proves what he said about himself, that he was God, and that he offers the forgiveness of sin.

I mean, I know that the guilt that not only I, but every human being has when we do something we know is wrong, my conscience understood that, but I didn't think I was going to be accountable to anybody with it.

At that moment is when I realized I would be accountable to God. And he vindicated it, proved it, by raising himself from the dead. And so I became a Christian at that time, turning from trusting basically my Judaism, as earning me righteousness, and trusting what Christ did on the cross.

And how old were you at that point?

I was 16 at that time. 16, okay, interesting. So, okay, so you're a Christian. One of the things that I've learned is, saying you're a Christian is like saying I drive a car. So can you lay out, because we've had lots of different Christians on our show, can you lay out your, and I don't mean to be disrespectful, but it's just the first thing that popped into my head,.

Your flavor of Christianity? Yeah, and it's a good question, because as you came on our show, and we talked about, you brought up Stephen Anderson. And I think you were surprised that both Anthony and I were like, yeah, we don't put him in the category of Christian.

What Makes Someone a Christian

Yeah, so the thing when he said, what is a Christian? Ultimately, a Christian is going to be someone who puts their ultimate trust in God and his word. Right? We're going to be, so why am I saying it that way?

When you have, as you've probably met, plenty of professing atheists who say, I used to be a Christian. And they weren't. They were never a Christian. They were hypocrites that stopped pretending. They pretended to be a Christian.

Why would I say that? Well, two reasons. One, it's biblical. In 1 John 2 .19, it says, they went out from among us because they were never of us. They went out to expose that they were not of us. So the Bible would say that they were never a Christian.

But more so, what you have is, you have people whose ultimate trust and authority was not God and his word. It was their reasoning, their ability to reason, their thinking. But ultimately, it becomes them.

Now, the way really I would say what is a Christian is going to be someone who doesn't trust in his good works, his genealogy, or him being a good person to earn righteousness with God. But they trust in what Christ did alone on the cross.

And there is a distinction being made here with that. Because you can have Roman Catholics say they're Christian. You'll have Jehovah Witnesses, Mormons, they all use the Christian name. In fact, anyone that just worships Christ or accepts Christ as a prophet could be Christian.

Islam is actually considered by some to be a Christian cult. That just swerved off even more. Because early on, Muhammad was actually teaching what he thought was a continuation of Christianity. So, what you end up with all of those that I mentioned is one key distinction.

And this key distinction is literally the difference between heaven and hell. And that is trusting in Christ alone. The reason being is every human-made religion, every one of them is going to have human effort.

In other words, Roman Catholics, it's faith plus works. So the faith is not enough. You have to add the works. If you're looking at Islam, it's going to be doing one good deed, counts for ten bad. And you're just at the mercy of Allah to accept it.

If you do what we call Rabbinical or Second Temple Judaism, the Judaism that's known of today, not the Biblical Judaism that was in the Old Testament, they would say that we do Torah, we obey the law.

Again, works. Hinduism, Buddhism, any of them. What you end up seeing is they all have an element that is human effort. Even if it's added to faith, but the ultimate way someone gets right with God is human effort.

That's a man-made religion. So I can objectively look at any religion. I did it when I wrote my book, What Do They Believe? What Do They Believe? is basically a systematic theology of the major Western religions.

And what I did was I studied from their sources and systematized their belief systems. In Islam, I think it's one of the only ones, actually.

Just one second. I don't want to forget about it, but if people are interested in your book, where can they find it? All my books can be found at.

Strivingforeternity .org on the store there. You can get What Do They Believe? What Do We Believe? Dr. Silvestro's book, which you might be interested in, On the Origin of Kinds, because that's going to deal a lot with some of the things you discuss as far as creation, evangelism, presuppositional apologetics, that's what that book will cover.

Sorry, you were talking about Islam. Yeah, because what I did with What Do They Believe? Here's a thing that frustrated me when I wrote this, or what I was reading from others. I listened to a rabbi who was talking about Christianity and he misrepresented what Christianity actually is, but since most of his audience is always rabbis or Jewish people, they know nothing about it, and so he seems like an expert.

I actually have had a thing that when the rabbi who gave me all these cassette tapes of this gentleman, I said, I'll debate him anytime, anywhere. And he actually heard that and challenged me to a debate.

He actually created a poster for it. And then when he found out how I, he listened to some of my debates and he didn't want to debate me anymore. So, but I didn't want to misrepresent someone's position.

So that book is different than most books on world religions because what it isn't doing is trying to refute the religions. It's trying to explain what they actually believe.

Sure, yeah. It's interesting that you say that because I've, and we talked about this before, but I spent probably a total of four years studying with one of the groups that you mentioned, Jehovah's Witnesses.

And they call themselves Christian, like without hesitation. One of the couple, because I'm sure you're aware, but it's always a couple that shows up at your house, right? And it's usually two men or two women at first, but then if you actually have a Bible study, it's typically either the man or the woman and their spouse that come with them if they are married.

And I'll never forget this. I was really, I was in my early 20s the first time this happened. And I said, well, you know, would this whole Jehovah's Witnesses thing explain it to me? And they said that the Watchtower and what I came to know later is the Watchtower, Bible, and tract society.

But Jehovah's Witnesses were descendants, these were their words, of first century Christians. And in my head I'm just like, well, everyone in my regular audience can assume what I actually said. But what I said was, well, that's BS.

And it didn't sit well kind of from that point on. Like, how on earth, how could you possibly recognize that historically? But I spent a lot of time, and Jehovah's Witnesses are one of the groups that a lot of times when I talk to Christians, they really have no idea what Witnesses actually believe.

And one of the biggest tell-tale ones is they say, well, only 144 ,000 people are going to heaven. You have no idea what you're talking about. That's not what they believe at all. So I'm curious, do you know what they actually mean by the 144 ,000?

So there's 144 ,000 saints that would be in the new heaven, and the rest would be on the new earth.

That's right. The 144 ,000 is 12 ,000 from each of the 12 tribes of Israel. So a witness shall be made to all the nations, and the end will come, the end comes. And these 144 ,000 go to heaven to become angels.

I met one of these people at one of their conventions in Hamilton at Copse Coliseum. And this person was introduced to me as someone who knew that they were going to be an angel. And I openly laughed, because I couldn't help myself.

I'm like, what do you mean you know you're going to be an angel? What?

So that was interesting. See now, if he ran into a Mormon, the Mormon would have said, well, you're just going to be an angel. I'm going to be a god.

Exactly, yeah. That's another thing. Mormonism I always said was good science fiction.

I think Joseph Smith was a science fiction writer before there was such a genre of science fiction.

He might have L. Ron Hubbard beat, actually.

Well, L. Ron Hubbard, there's a little interesting thing with him. Do you know how Scientology started? How he started that? I haven't read snippets of that. I don't have a lot of in-depth information.

So it started over a.

Poker bet. Sweet.

So he was playing poker with some friends. They had a $1 million bet that he could create a religion, and I think he had to get 100 ,000 followers within, I think it was one or two year period. Now, when I was growing up, you had three channels.

For some of your audience, they may not understand that. Before cable, you had a choice of three channels. And every commercial was his book Dianetics. Now, he probably spent like $3 or $4 million to win $1 million.

But he did win the $1 million. But the thing that I ended up seeing when I was working on the book, and I spent 14 years studying other religions and researching them, looking from their authorities so I don't misrepresent them, and then going to people who are authorities in those different religions and asking, am I accurate?

To check the work. I had one guy, I still remember this, I had this Mormon, I was at a Mormon festival, and this one Mormon said to me that no Christian ever presents Mormonism without misrepresenting it.

I said, okay, well I'll tell you what, I'll give you a copy of my book, you tell me if there's anything I have wrong. If you can't find anything major, you pay the $15 for the book, and if not, if you find something, you get it free.

He was like, okay. So I sent him the book. He found three grammatical errors, so I corrected those. Two, that he actually said, I wouldn't even mention these, but I'm struggling to find something. And then the only thing he could find was the fact that I had said something about the birth order and their thinking between Jesus and Lucifer.

Some Latter-day Saints believe they were born at the same time, some think that Jesus was born first. I said they were born at the same time, so he questioned that, but he had to admit that it is a discussion within Mormonism.

So I said, so essentially you're saying I got everything correct. Yeah. I never saw the $15 either. But you look at all those, and they all have human effort. They all have an element of people getting right with God by human effort, by some level of it.

And that's what you see with a man-made religion. You don't see that with Christianity. The distinction there is that it's trusting what Christ did, not what we do. Okay, so then can you, do you have a way to.

Label what it is? Because we talked about a bunch of stuff, and I'm still not understanding what you mean when you say you call yourself a Christian. So to label that.

Like your version of that. So I generally use a different term.

Like being saved by grace alone, Bible alone, that kind of stuff? Well, not Bible alone, but.

The Reformation would word it as being saved by faith alone, in grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. And so that would be the thing, the issue I would say is I would word it as I was converted.

Because that's an easier term to understand. Okay, sure. And this is a misnomer that some people have, is just because if you're born into a Christian family, like your parents are Christian, that doesn't mean you are.

That's different than other religions.

Thank you for saying that, because it's actually something that Richard Dawkins talked about in The God Delusion, saying that he didn't want people saying, this is a Christian child or a Muslim child.

This is a child of Christian parents. You know, a child of Muslim parents. So I appreciate you saying that. Although I'm sure you're going to add a caveat.

Well, no, I'm not. The thing that you see with a lot of religions, like if you look at Catholicism, if your parents are Roman Catholic and you're born in that family, you're automatically Roman Catholic.

So, there are religions like that. Now, Islam is pretty much, there's a little distinction in Islam, because you're supposed to, to be a Muslim, you're supposed to recite the prayer in front of witnesses in Arabic.

But there's plenty of Muslims who grow up never doing that, or maybe doing it as a child when they don't know what they're really doing. But the thing is, you have to convert to Christianity. And that conversion is a change of thinking between what you trust as far as what gives righteousness.

Instead of trusting self, you're trusting what Christ did. Jehovah's Witnesses.

Don't baptize their children. It has to be their choice, like in adolescence, early adulthood. Would you say that's something they got right?

I, you know, I struggle even with baptizing a child if they want to. Because, you know, there's too many people who they grew up with parents that are Christian, their friends get baptized, or their parents want them to get baptized, and they do it, not really understanding what they're doing.

Not really believing. It's overwhelming, for sure. And so I do everything to really dissuade, actually. Because I want them to really be convinced. I mean, I don't want them just saying it because they think...

I don't want people being hypocrites, basically. So I don't want people saying they're Christian when they're not. Baptism is supposed to be an outward sign of an inward change. So if someone's not genuinely a Christian, they didn't convert to Christianity, the baptism's meaningless.

And yet what a lot of people do, because they think of Roman Catholicism and others, where the baptism is what is the entrance into the religion. So people think that, well, I got baptized, I'm a Christian.

Or I go to a church, I'm a member of a church, I'm a Christian. Going to church makes you a Christian as much as going to McDonald's makes you a hamburger.

Sure, yeah. So here's an interesting point. People have different things to... people think different things about the person I'm about to mention. But his book has an interesting segment on his quote-unquote conversion, baptism.

But I'm sure you've heard of David Smalley. And his book, Baptized Atheist, actually has a really... one of the chapters in that talks about him being baptized as a child. And it was almost exactly what you just described, and why you try to discourage that.

And that was the first thing I thought of when you said that. I'm like, oh, that reminds me of this piece of Smalley's book. It's an interesting.

Read. If you ever get the chance. Yeah, well, I could play you a short clip of, about 10 seconds long, of me and David Smalley.

This was... I've heard it on your show.

But this was, he was debating Matt Slick on moralism. And, you know, basically saying the fact that there's talk of slavery, that the Bible's immoral. So slavery is an issue of ownership, right? So I asked him this question.

Mr. Smalley, do you believe that abortion is moral? Oh, boy. Yeah.

I'm glad I'm debating him instead of you. Yeah, so he didn't want to debate. Abortion is a hot-button topic, especially now with some of the things that are going on in the U .S.

But okay, so then, if you... Well, there's a reason that question comes up, right? Because think about it. What is abortion? It is an ownership issue. There's functionally no difference between saying, this is my property and this is my body, right?

So, if you're saying that slavery is immoral because you own, you have ownership rights to another human being, well, that's exactly what we're saying with abortion. It's, I have ownership rights. We're saying they're not fully human, which is exactly the argument that was made with blacks and why they could be slaves, is they weren't human.

So, abortion is they're not human, this is my body, I can do what I want with it. And so, you end up having the legalization of the killing of another person. So, if slavery is immoral, well, abortion should be far more immoral because abortion is not just an ownership, but it...

Slavery didn't always end in murder, or in the loss of life. Actually, if you ever read the book, 12 Years a Slave, it was Solomon... Solomon, I forget his last name. He got kidnapped. He actually said that if the only slavery he knew was his first master, he wouldn't have had a problem with slavery.

I haven't been able to personally reconcile, but I also have no experience to compare it to, so... I don't want to jump too much down the rabbit hole of abortion because I was really wanting to talk about that on the 5th when I come back on your show.

But, what I will say is there is no reasonable argument against the fact that an abortion is the termination of a life. I don't care how liberal you are. I don't care how Republican you are. I don't care.

Left, right, wing. That's not an argument that can reasonably be made. An abortion is the termination of a life, without question. And I think anyone that tries to argue otherwise,.

I don't think is being honest. Well, I'm going to agree with you. I'm going to be speaking at a conference in Indianapolis this week, on Thursday, on this topic of abortion. And, it really is, it's an issue where I agree with you.

When you look at it scientifically, you have two different DNAs. You know, mother and their child are two different blood types, two different genders. I mean, it's a different human being. It is the termination of it, of that life.

But, you know, it is, here's where I think abortion is so fundamental for some people. There's something that changed when we legalized abortion and started promoting it. We've changed the cultures that support abortion.

You've seen a change from a dignity culture to a victim culture. So, in other words, we no longer see dignity in other human beings. We see people as victims. So, instead of seeing a child, and that that child in the womb has dignity, they're made in the image of God, they have a right to life.

Instead, it's, well, the mother doesn't want to have to bear this child, or doesn't want to change her lifestyle to have to deal with the child. She's not ready, she doesn't want the child. Maybe the child was the product of someone doing something to the woman she didn't want, whether it be rape or incest.

Again, these things show the woman as the victim. And that has really become the nomenclature of our culture. Even in your culture in Canada, you have a lot of the victim mentality that is really rampant.

And people don't see dignity in other people as we used to.

Abortion, Victimhood, and the Morality of Words

I'm not sure I could disagree with you more. But, again, I don't want to jump too much into the abortion thing, but it is something that I'd like to bring up on the 5th. What I will say is, I mean, I fundamentally disagree with all of it.

But the last question I want to ask you on that is, you do but, so, if a woman, and I accept that that rape being the reason for an abortion is, I don't know the exact percentage, but I understand it's very low.

Probably, I think it's under 5%. And incest might be the same. I don't know. I don't have any statistics on that. But you wouldn't disagree that in the situation where a woman was raped, or it was the, or there was an issue of incest, you wouldn't disagree that that woman was victimized, would you?

Well, she was victimized. If she was raped, yes, she was victimized in the incident of the rape. But whether she should carry the child to term and either give it up for adoption or raise the child is, you know, it's not the child's fault for what the father did.

Right? So why do you punish the child? I agree that.

It is not, yeah, I mean, the person who committed the assault, that is the person who is at fault. But I want to stop that there. But I want so badly to dive into that another time. And for everybody who's listening, when we do have that conversation, there'll absolutely be a link posted.

And actually, what you can do is you don't even have to wait. You can go to Apologetics Live, and you can watch the conversation as it happens.

It's ApologeticsLive .com. And anyone that wants to come in, any Thursday night, 8 to 10 Eastern Time, if you go to ApologeticsLive .com, we put the links, unless we're doing a formal debate. If we have a formal debate, we won't have a link to join.

And we'll note that. But any Thursday night, we'll have guests, like you come in, but if someone comes in and asks a question, even if we have you on and we're talking with you, but someone comes in and asks, we just engage with that person as well.

So anyone can come in anytime.

That's what the show is there for. Yeah. So let's, okay, so let's talk about that because it's interesting. And one of the things that I find interesting about it is that, I don't want to say it's unique, but there are, and I think there's a lot of factors that go into it.