 that religion is not true. People instead of dedicating their time and their money to religion, what would they then do? So I just want to take a strictly secular atheist perspective on this. So from a secular perspective, the primary purpose of religion is to provide emotional comfort. So people would seek out emotional comfort in other ways. So if people weren't donating say 1% of their income to their religion, then they would seek other ways to find comfort. So they'd probably subscribe to more streaming services. They would donate more money to various patriarchal accounts. They would seek out secular gurus. They would sign up for Sam Harris's meditation app. They would spend more time and money with psychology, with yoga, with other things that bring comforts. Some other ways of forming communities, sharing common interests, say they'd go to more poetry readings. They would spend more time gazing at the sky. They may spend more time in social justice. But overall, what they're gonna do primarily is to seek emotional comfort. We live in a less emotional age. We live in a less mysterious world, more and more of our lives are governed by rational processes. We live under neoliberalism and our lives are governed by what will make the most sense economically, generally speaking. So everything has become increasingly rationalized and there's less and less room for mystery in our lives. And so people feel disconnected and they're gonna look for some primordial forms of excitement and comfort and purpose and meaning. And if they don't have religion, then they'll have to look elsewhere. So I just wanna take that purely secular approach to religion as religion exists to make people feel better, to provide them comfort because life is difficult. And so James Jenny, I was playing some of his video the other day, got this big long new video on the dark world of mega churches. So how dark is that world? And let's say people weren't giving money to religion. How wonderful would it then become? Would the world become? Would we be making missions to Mars? Would we develop technology to remove plastic from the oceans? Would we solve our homeless problems if we weren't so preoccupied by religion? Is its name and its teachings are often referred to as the prosperity gospel. It's a simple idea. God wants you to be prosperous through your finances. Okay, so from a strictly secular perspective, I don't see what's more heinous about this religious teaching as compared to any other religious teaching, right? So how exactly is the prosperity gospel so awful? Well, you might say it separates people from their money, but everything in our neoliberal world is separating people from their money, right? We're trying to get people to sign up to a particular streaming service or a particular long distance program. Business is always wanting to sign you up and to sell you things. And we're always trying to maximize our own interests. So it doesn't seem terribly shocking to me that religious people are trying to maximize their own power, their own prestige, and their own wealth. And I don't see from a secular perspective or even from a Jewish perspective, why a Christian teaching that God wants you to be prosperous is any worse than any other Christian or other non-Jewish teaching. So I believe in Judaism. So obviously I think my religion is the most true one, but let's just take this from a purely secular or atheistic perspective that then, or religious teachings, their only worth is what they produce in real life for people, right? That would be the secular approach. And so I don't see if so fact now on the face of it, what's so heinous about the teaching that God wants you to be prosperous? To me that teaching would serve some people, harm other people and be a wash for others. But on the face of it, I don't see the prosperity gospel as being one of the 50 things most troubling America right now. Your health, your marriage and relationships. In fact, those are things that belong to you through your faith. I mean, that sounds great to me, right? This teaching that God wants you to be prosperous and to thrive, right? What's the problem? Why is that so heinous? And you say, well, it's a manipulation technique and it separates people from their best interests and it separates people from their money and it leads people to live lives of delusion. But people who are so stupid and gullible and naive to be taken in by the prosperity gospel, let's say they weren't taken in by the prosperity gospel, they'd be taken in by something else. The people who believe in the prosperity gospel, they would believe in anything. So I don't see out of all the alternatives that now have why this is such a heinous alternative. Faith, if you're willing to receive it, the prosperity gospel often refers to its believers as a little God. The idea being that we were made in the image of God and therefore possess a level of divinity within us that allows us to bring into existence the prosperity that we've been promised. Okay, so I think most religions posit that there is a spark of the divide in us. So again, I don't see the problem. You are God, little G, you are God because... Okay, and so I'm sure this teaching can be abused and some people go, oh, I'm God, so therefore I can commit adultery and I can steal from people because I'm God. But I think just as many people, the moral upshot of this would be a wash and then for other people, they'd even find this a no-bling. You came from God. And you're a DNA and Jesus DNA. So I was raised in 7th Adventist Christian. I received very little of this teaching. I don't remember any of this teaching in my Protestant upbringing. Okay, I was raised in Protestant churches for the first 18 years of my life. I'd never heard this and I've certainly not heard this in my Jewish journey. I converted to Judaism at age 27. And they are exact. You're exactly like it. It sounds amazing. So how do I... Yeah, it sounds amazing if you're particularly credulous, right? People need excitement in their lives. Our lives have become so bureaucratized and rationalized and more and more of life has been explicated and it's been subject to scientific inquiry that this kind of approach makes the transcendent realm come alive for some people if you're particularly credulous. And so I'm sure this approach adds meaning and excitement and purpose and emotional comfort to a whole lot of people. And so, frankly, overall, I think this probably does more good than harm. I earn this prosperity. How do I access this divine power that I supposedly have? Well, it starts with your faith. Really, so I mean, there are all sorts of people in Hollywood, right? Who will teach the young, impressionable Anjanur who wants to make it in Hollywood, who wants to access the power of her acting capacity, essentially transmitting to her the message like everything you need to succeed in Hollywood is inside of me and all you have to do is suck it out. If you are so gullible to submit to the casting couch, then people take advantage of you. If you let someone stick his fist in your ass, people will stick their fist in your ass. If you allow people to walk all over you, people will walk all over you. If you allow people to abuse you, people will abuse you. If you allow people to lie to you and steal from you and rip you off, that's exactly what people do. We're kind of programmed to maximize the things we want and what largely restrains us are the reactions that we get from other people. And so if you are sending out the signal, I'm gullible. Oh, wow, everything I need to succeed in Hollywood is inside your penis and all I have to do is suck it out. Then if you're so gullible to buy that or to buy what James Jenny is describing, then you're gonna get ripped off and you're gonna get hurt. And if you don't get hurt in religion, you'll get hurt in some other way because you're stupid. It's really hard to protect stupid people, all right? It's really hard to protect the gullible, the willfully naive. But if you'll stay in faith, there will come a point where God will say, enough is enough, it's payback time. God will say, I know you love the Lord, so you qualify for prosperity. Next, you have the act of tithing. The initial concept of tithing was this idea that you give one-tenth of your wealth in some way, shape, or form to a religious organization. Most houses of worship are going to rely on the donation. So this is what I had growing up as a Seventh-day Adventist. So Seventh-day Adventists generally speaking give a tenth of their money and a seventh of their time as they keep the Seventh-day Sabbath. Orthodox Jews pretty similarly. Mainstream Protestants and mainstream Catholics, they tend to only give about 1% of their income according to surveys. So mainstream religion is much more rational. Mainstream religion isn't pushing the prosperity gospel. And if you go to mainstream religion, mainstream Judaism, it's kind of a lifeless affair compared to the emotional intensity that you find in high-commitment religion. So high-commitment religion means things like Orthodox Judaism, traditional forms of Catholicism, Pentecostalism, Protestant fundamentalism. These are all forms of high-commitment religion. And when you sign up for high-commitment religion, you're spending your time with other people who are also highly committed. And so it's an intense world. It's filled with emotion and passion and drive and faith, belief, purpose. It's easier to access the transcendent to access God because you're with other people who are also transmitting on that same wavelength. Now, you think that that's kind of gullible and silly. And so you want a more rational religion so that you can go for mainstream religion, but then it doesn't have the emotion and the excitement. And you're not going to be surrounded by other people with a high-commitment to religion. This is just one aspect of a person's life in mainstream religion. But in high-commitment religion, your commitment to your religion shapes the rest of your life. You have your religion, and then everything else has to fit into your religion. While those who practice mainstream religion, that's just one aspect. And their religion will often bend and acquiesce and submit to other things that they want to do in life. Of their congregation, in order to continue their operations, especially megachurches, it is kind of like giving to a charity. But tithing through the teachings of the prosperity gospel introduces a, should we call it a plot twist. Tithing lays the foundation for financial success and abundance. Okay, so I was listening to a course on audible on communication and it made this fundamental point. Meaning lies in relationships, not in words. So this video, the Dark World of Megachurches by James Jenney is taking a sentence here and a sentence there. But the meaning of these sentences is not in the words of these sentences. The meaning of these sentences is to be found in the relationship between the speaker and his audience. And that relationship goes back a lot further than what you're seeing here, a sentence here and a sentence there. If you took a sentence from the 40 show, I could look like the biggest fool in the world, right? You only understand words once you put them into the context of a relationship. There's a speaker and there's an audience. So you can take a sentence here, a sentence here from preachers and they may sound stupid, naive, gullible, like they're running a con, like they're scam artists, they're naive, right? But you're just accepting a little bit from them, you're just taking a few words, you're not understanding the relationship in which they're working. Usually these preachers have a relationship with their flock and they have a flock precisely because they give something back to them. They provide meaning and purpose and a taste of the transcendence and they make God real for people and they make people happy and they comfort people and they may provide pastoral counsel and they help provide and form a community and they lift people up and that people feel morally elevated, right? So it's within that context of a relationship whereby these religious leaders are giving, giving, giving to a flock and the reason they have a flock is because they're giving, right? There are a lot of sources for emotional comfort in the world today. You can buy HBO Max, you can get a Netflix subscription, you can subscribe to the New York Times, you can buy music, you can download movies, you can join the yacht club, you can take up a hobby, you can practice meditation, you can go to yoga, you can go to therapy, you can get a secular guru out of all these hundreds of options for emotional comfort. Yet tens of thousands of people choose these religious leaders in this video because these religious leaders are meeting fundamental human needs such as purpose, meaning emotions, comfort, excitement, transcendence, a path to God. Tithing is the way for recession or depression to bypass you. Here, Stephanie from Maryland Rights, I sent in my first hoots offering. Two weeks later, I received, watch this, $2,400. So now, so I remember I joined one 12-step program and I immediately experienced some benefits because usually when you join a 12-step program you create room in your life for doing things a little differently and when you stop doing everything 100% your way, usually you receive some blessings fairly quickly. And so I received some blessings fairly quickly upon joining this 12-step program. Then I was eager to go back to the group and to share my good news. So it's not just a matter of this woman here on this video is, sounds incredibly naive, but I suspect she's joined a community that has brought great joy and meaning and purpose and emotional comfort to her. And so she is choosing to interpret everything through the perspective of that relationship. And if you're not in the relationship, if you're not in the dance, then it doesn't make any sense. But if you're in the dance, if you are in that relationship, if you had experienced what belonging to this virtual community had done for this woman, then you would understand why she sees the world the way she does, why she interprets blessings that have happened to her as a result of her relationship with Pastor Paula. Now, it isn't just about donating your money to a church. It becomes a case where you're exchanging your money in return for actual prosperity. You'll often hear some of these prosperity preachers referred to it as sowing your seed. Then, look, people want to know what's in it for them. And so whether it's secular salesman or religious salesman, the most effective talk in terms of what's in it for you. So rabbis will talk about the benefits of practicing Judaism and how wonderful it is to be Jewish. Christians talk about the wonders of the Christian life and Alexander Technique teachers talk about the wonders of taking Alexander Technique lessons. And yoga teachers talk about the wonders of yoga and people who are passionately devoted to their political party talk about the wonders of their political party. So I don't see anything sinister here. Implication is pretty obvious to anyone who. I don't see anything that is more. There are lots of bad psychologists out there who rip you off. There are lots of bad doctors. There are lots of bad plumbers. There are lots of bad salesmen. There are a lot of bad lawyers and bad accountants. There are a lot of bad people. There are a lot of lazy people out there in any profession. I don't see why this world of megachurches is so dark. Who's watching? No, you give us some of your money and in return that value will be given back to you in some way, shape or form. It's the harvest. I want you to go to the phone or online and sow a seed. Now remember. If somebody's son is gonna be set free from alcohol because of your thousand dollar seed. And I'm going to ask you to sow an exceptional and uncommon seed of 1,000. I mean, is this any more ridiculous than a Donald Trump fundraising letter or any politicians fundraising letter or people who wanna save koalas when I was walking through downtown Sydney, there was a group of people who just wanted to have a conversation. There was an attractive woman who asked me if I wanted to have a conversation. It's like, sure, I wanted to have a conversation. And she talked to me about what was I doing in Sydney. I talked to her. I was out here on a trip and we just had a nice general conversation for a couple of minutes. And then she talked about how koalas were endangered. And so I said, okay, talk to me about koalas. And then she said, would you like to sign up and donate? We've got a minimum membership here $18 a month. And I said, well, now I can't do that right now but you can put me on a mailing list. But she didn't wanna put me on a mailing list. She only wanted to sign me up if I was gonna give money every month. She wanted my credit card number. And I said, no, I'm sorry, I can't do that. And I walked away. So I don't know why these particular religious leaders in this video or any more heinous on average than what else is there in the world? Trying to tap your wallet. Click on that donation button just so $1,144. So God is giving you the harvest and the harvest off the seed you sow. You can't expect the harvest if you don't sow seed, spiritual, physical or financial. So why are these religious leaders speaking this way? Because they're meeting a need. People want to feel hope. People wanna feel excited. People wanna feel the transcendent. People wanna feel the possibility of prosperity. When I came out to Los Angeles in 1994, all right, I had a girlfriend who said, oh, you should look into modeling. And so when I was looking for work, opening up the LA Weekly Help Wanted Ads, it was just filled with ads for actors and models. So I thought, oh, this is wonderful. I'm gonna stop my career. And so I went to a lot of these ads and I got taken by a lot of scams. And you know why I got taken? Because I wanted to believe those scams were meeting a need in me for feeling that I was special, that I had star quality, that I had model quality, that I could have been somebody. And one of the things that happened to me was that I got an agent, Debbie Durkin, and by just landing an agent, that filled me with a sense of confidence that I could do it. And while I never succeeded as an actor or model, the confidence that I got from landing an agent and going on auditions, that served me well in life. It helped launch me into my first book project. And yeah, she manipulated me into taking some acting classes that cost me like $2,500 for like a three-day acting intensive. So various people ripped me off, but that was because I wanted a certain something. Like I was vulnerable or I wanted to believe in a fantasy that I was special, that I had the right stuff, that I could be an actor and I could be a model and I could be a special one. And I wanted to partake of that incredible sexual energy that was all around me in Hollywood. So those scams, they got my money because they met my needs. I remember one place I signed up and they put an announcement in Variety that I had a lead role in a forthcoming movie. It was like right there in Variety. Now, yeah, it was a scam. I should have been out to see that. But for $100 or $150 that they took me for, hey, there was my name in Variety that cast as the lead of a forthcoming motion picture. So why do people act the way they do? Because they've received rewards for acting the way they do. When you encounter someone who's always trying to bully people, that's because that's been an effective tactic for him. When you encounter people who are just always trying to please and be helpful, that's because that's an effective tactic for them. And why pastors are speaking the way they do is because this is effective. It's beating people's needs as much as the psychologist or the salesman for some magnesium supplement or the attorney on a billboard saying, hey, is your boss a jerk? Call me. It's surreal and it generates a lot of money. On January the 12th of 2008, Kenneth Copeland Ministries took possession of a Gulfstream jet, which was funded all thanks to the donors of his church. In fact, KCM wrote a blog post thanking their followers for helping them, quote, So this guy is meeting their needs. He's not running a scam. He's saying, I need a Gulfstream and people are donating and they feel like they're helping the work of the Lord and they feel like they're accelerating their own potential for prosperity and they feel like they're participating in something marvelous. And many poor people get a thrill seeing their religious leader flourishing in life. Many people's lives are so miserable that they want to abandon their own identity and dissolve into the identity of a group or of their hero. Obviously the Gulfstream, but our work is not done to which the blog then proceeds to remind our followers that they still need 17 million more dollars which will be used for the quote sowing towards the construction of a new hanger, upgrading the existing runway and purchasing special Gulfstream maintenance equipment. And remember, this letter is part of an ongoing relationship. It's not like this is the only communication between this religious dude and his followers, right? This video is taking an excerpt of a communication which makes the religious guy look ridiculous and smarmy if not downright evil but it's just accepting this out of an ongoing relationship. This guy has built up a connection with thousands of people and how did he do it? By meeting their needs, by giving them something that they weren't getting elsewhere quite as good. He makes them feel something. He makes them feel excited. He makes them feel alive. He makes them feel like they have purpose, right? He is meeting their needs for emotional comfort and emotional excitement and community. And so once you've established that relationship, then he's asking them just like a guy is married to a woman and he provides for her and he protects her and he takes care of her and then occasionally he asks her for a blow job. And if you just took that, it's like, oh man, look at this smarmy guy asking this woman for a blow job. What a creep. No, he's not a creep. That blow job request was in the context of an overall relationship where he's loving this woman, providing for this woman, protecting this woman, being faithful to this woman, in exchange, he asks for a blow job. Or how about Creflo Dollar's infamous sermon to which he tells his congregation to help him fundraise towards a private jet? All to the resp- Okay, so Half Galician hates supplements and he makes the point that supplement sellers don't have to really prove their efficacy unlike pharmaceutical drugs. Okay, that's true, but let's just take it for a discussion sake that all supplements are useless and people spend, let's say, $100 a month on supplements. Are they getting any benefit? Of course they're getting benefit. They believe that these supplements are helping them, otherwise they wouldn't take them. And so they get the benefit of the placebo effect and it wouldn't surprise me if the benefit that they get from that placebo effect far exceeds however much money they pay out. Sponsor of cheers and applause from the audience. If I wanna believe God for a $65 million plane, you cannot stop me. You cannot stop me from dreaming. See, Copeland and Dollar's pleased for money, they're not. Okay, so Half Galician, my resident critic says, look, what's your point though? I think I've been pretty clear from a secular perspective, the point of religion is to provide emotional comfort. These religious leaders in this video are providing their followers with exactly that emotional comfort. They are meeting a need. Also, many people in life have various emotional needs that they wanna get met and from an outside perspective it looks like they're participating in being scanned. But when you understand people's deeper emotional needs and how they're getting an emotional payoff from participating in the quote unquote scam, then you understand it with the transaction within the context of the relationship, within the context of somebody's emotional needs, which is very different from Half Galician says, if I have a need to clean a shirt and the laundry scams me, am I somehow a party to this because it fills the need? But yeah, if you go back to that laundromat and they scam you time and time and time and time again and you keep going back, yeah, there's some need that launderer is meeting. Now, if you go one off and they scam you, you should never go there again and you'd write a negative review on Google, but you're not looking to that laundromat to meet your emotional needs. I'm talking about from a secular perspective, the primary purpose of religion is meeting people's emotional needs. And if people didn't have religion, they would turn elsewhere to meet their emotional needs. So it's not a transaction like cleaning a shirt. It's not met with criticism and backlash from their congregation. It's celebrated and prosperity preachers will... And why is it celebrated? Because it's meeting people's needs. Makes people feel great. Okay, when I was with porn stars, porn stars are the only women who ever told me, that they loved my cock. I don't think any other woman, aside from a porn star, has told me has praised my penis, right? And even though I knew that was just what they do and they would just scream with ecstasy when I would enter them. It's like, I was the most amazing thing ever. Like, even though I knew they were putting on a performance, I freaking loved it. Like, it's writing the E-Ticket or the A-Ticket, whatever it was when you go to Disneyland. So yeah, they were putting on a performance, but I still liked it. When the checkout clock is nice to me in the grocery store, it says have a nice day. Now, I prefer that to, you know, grim, you know, Eastern European, sullen, you know, quiet. We're emotional creatures. We have emotional needs, right? There's nothing wrong with having emotional needs. And this is a safe place for you to share your emotional needs. And if we can, we'll try to provide some sort of solace for you. And if you just subscribe to like level three of this YouTube channel, I have great confidence that the videos that will be unlocked for you to the level three membership will provide incredible emotional reassurance. Obviously say that this aids in their quest to spread their message across to different countries. If I flew commercial, I'd have to stop 65% of what I'm doing. Conveniently, that message obviously allows them to make- And that may be true, right? He's a performer, right? I'm a performer, all right? There were years where I made virtually no YouTube videos, right? From basically 2012 to well into 2015, I made virtually no YouTube videos because I was failing at life in various ways. I lacked the self-confidence and the brashness to go on here and to share my thoughts. And there have been days and weeks in my life in the last year where I've made almost no videos because there's something else going on in my life and I may not have the emotional strength to step in front of the camera and perform. And so this guy, Copeland, he may well need his own private jet to be able to perform at a high level. It's not uncommon for performers to need various accommodations that sound ridiculous to the layperson. So the opera star who confesses to the manager that she's not feeling good, she's not gonna be able to perform tonight, and she wants his emotional reassurance, oh, you're so wonderful, you're great. I remember because of my stupid vegetarian lifelong diet, you know, I've struggled with chronic fatigue since age 21 until about six months ago when I started taking grass-fed beef organ supplements and I was in Montreal for five days working on a documentary for the CBC. It eventually came out in 1999 as Give Me Your Soul and I was helping to carry their equipment and I was just really tired and it was only an hour or two into my day. So it was like nine AM and we had a whole day of filming ahead and I was exhausted, but they had one PA, personal assistant who just kind of mothered me, just showed me a little kindness, gave me a little bit of attention and I just poked right up and then I had the energy to go all day and you'd say, oh, look, you're such a loser that you need some personal attention to get the energy to perform. Well, performers often need things that will sound ridiculous to your average person and a preacher is a performer, right? We need little things to turn our crank so we can make these amazing productions like the one you're viewing right now. Make even more donations, but these preachers, they don't just live lavish, right? They put it on full display. You think Jesus Christ would have rolled around and rolled around? Okay, so this is very different from the laundromat who does a bad job with your shirt, right? These are people that are being honest and open and forthright, right? It's like a guy who says to the woman, I really wanna sleep with you but I don't want a relationship with you, I'm not gonna marry you, I just really wanna sleep with you tonight. I mean, these guys are being incredibly open and honest. So I think it's quite upstanding of them to operate this way. This is the opposite of deception. Rolls Royce? I think he would. Let's get a close-up of Gloria's ring. Where am I looking, right here? You fly in a private plane. Yes, I do. You're staying right now in one of the fanciest hotels in New York City. Yes, I am. You wear very nice clothing. So, the wealth. Look, they thought it looked pretty damn happy to me. I don't have a problem with what these guys are doing. Now, if they're engaged in fraud, if they're breaking the law, if they're telling significant lies, if they're running scams, then of course I'm opposed, but from what James Jenny is presenting in this video, these guys are open and honest. Of these preachers, they're not seen as gross or hypocritical. In fact, they're seen of proof that the teachings work. It's seen as them- They're not hypocritical. It's not seen as hypocritical. Given the evidence you're presenting, James, they are not hypocritical. They're upstanding. They are forthright. They are open and honest. They are how we would want most people to be. Imagine if everyone was as open as honest as these people. I'm actually practicing what they preach, the extravagant lifestyle. That's not a mistake or a flaw. It's a feature of the process. And what's wrong with the performer having the extravagant lifestyle? If they earn it, if they're open and honest about it and they meet people's emotional needs, and in return, people send them money, that seems like a win-win to me. Verity gospel. Many of these preachers will say that the funds that they received are used only for ministry purposes. So why would some people watch this video and just become like really angry and disgusted and hate religion and hate these preachers? For the same reason that we all get triggered for different things that goes back to our childhood. So in your childhood, if you saw people in religious power taking advantage of you or taking advantage of others, then that's probably burned an imprint into you so that you react very strongly against this type of behavior. And out of father, who was a preacher who had a PhD in rhetoric. And so my father was very skilled with words and he was very skilled with using words to cut people to shreds. And so I thought he took advantage at times of his rhetorical abilities and his religious authority. I never saw him take advantage of people financially or sexually. I just saw him do it rhetorically. So I kind of went through my life where I just had this knee-jerk hatred of anyone who reminded me of my father. But if you're getting triggered by the dark world of mega churches or you're triggered by anything, then it goes back to childhood. Like there are some situations where I've been doing a job and I've made a mistake and I get nervous and anxious. And then I start spiraling. Then I make more mistakes and I get more nervous, more anxious, more fearful, more frightened. And then I make more mistakes and I just get into a downward spiral and I can't get out of it. And I end up getting fired because there was something in this situation that harkened back to a feeling of helplessness and fear and anxiety in my childhood. And I just start spiraling. This is Osteen, for example, says that he doesn't receive any salary from his ministry and all the money he makes comes from his book sales. Look, in some ways, I don't really care if a ministry wants to buy a private jet. It looks optically hypocritical, but I'd rather let theologians argue over the... Why does it look hypocritical? Because I assume James Jenney was raised within a British culture where the de facto religion is Christianity and Christianity has a lot of praise for poverty. But in Judaism, you find almost no praise for poverty. So he's reacting from the little bit that he knows of religion. He associates, oh, religion equals Christianity, which equals poverty is good. And so therefore, he's reacting against people who fly private jets and are religious. Contradictions that those actions have with actual religious texts. I'm more interested in how the money is generated and it doesn't get more unethical of a promise than it does with the prosperity gospel. If you're accustomed of giving $10... Why is it unethical? It seems open and above board. It seems honest and forthright. I think this is stellar ethics on behalf of these prosperity gospel preachers. Go up to 20, go up to 70, 80, 100. Praise that amount and watch what God... Anyone who's stupid enough to fall for this would be... And they, for some reason, they didn't fall for it. They'll be stupid enough to fall for some other... Some stupid thing else that's going around. Some other scam. It's not like if people don't fall for some dumb religion, but then they go on to lead rational lives. We have all sorts of impulses that are highly irrational. In fact, to be happy, most of us have to be somewhat disconnected from reality, that all sorts of irrational false beliefs serve us. And if you want to take a completely secular and atheistic perspective and regard religion as false belief, that doesn't discredit religion because those quote-unquote false beliefs may well still provide benefit to people such as emotional comfort. We'll do because... Don't you stop sowing offerings? Well, they won't let us go to church. Well, he made it in there, text and give or something. You get that tithe in that church. You get that offering in that church and then you go home and you do what we're supposed to do. This idea is no different than the law of attraction and manifestation circle. Right, so there are plenty of secular gurus who operate very similarly to these religious gurus. And why do people choose a guru? Because a guru meets some sort of emotional need in them. It's some kind of substitute father figure. It's some kind of source of transcendence. Maybe someone that you want to emulate in some way, right? Some people need heroes. The need for a guru seems fairly widespread, particularly in America. In Australia, I didn't notice people having gurus nearly as much. But in America, there's much more of an ethos that everyone can succeed. America's much more individualistic. You can be prepared to sacrifice everything, family, friends, community, everything that's familiar and comfortable to you so that you can become the star. And so in that kind of atmosphere, this kind of message is incredibly appealing. So America has a religion that's a mile wide and an inch deep, my father would say. So you see religion here has become highly secularized. It's essentially aimed at people's secular needs for prosperity. So the form is still religion, but the content is overwhelmingly secular. Calls that claim that you can use your mind to manifest any desire that you want. In fact, it's been argued that the prosperity theology does have similar roots to the new thought philosophy that became popular in America in the 19th century. When I look at Osteen, for example, I don't necessarily see a preacher. I see someone who's more akin to a self-help motivational speaker that use- That's exactly right. The form is religion. The content is secular self-help. Is God as a proxy? I am confident. I am confident. I am secure. I am secure. I am talented. I am self-help. Take a look, for example, at- So from a non-American perspective, this is just outrageous and ridiculous because in Europe and in Australia, when people are religious, this isn't the type of religion that they're subscribing to. People who are religious in Europe and Australia lead distinctive lives. They lead lives that are much more coherent with their religion. In America, religion is just like a jacket that you put off with rare exceptions. It's just something that you do to be seen as a good person. And it's a way to find some kind of similar of community. Osteen's New York Times bestseller book, Your Best Life Now, which is filled with all of these kinds of ideas. So here's a quote from the very first chapter, enlarging your vision. It's not God's lack of resources or your lack of talent that prevents you from prospering. Your own wrong thinking can keep you from God's best. And the book is riddled with these similar messages of becoming what you believe and the power of your words. It's a book like many others in the self-help genre. The connection isn't really that hard to see, but it's this sowing your seed message in the prosperity theology, the idea that you can donate to a church and in return, you can pay off your rent, pay off your credit card. This seems particularly stomach-churning. And now this is a- Why? Why is it stomach-churning? Why is it any more stomach-churning than any other appeals for your money, right? Wear this deodorant and you will become beloved and successful. So wear this lipstick, buy these clothes, drive this car, right? It's just in line with the rest of our neoliberal capitalist society where we're constantly selling. I remember when I'd publish a book, the primary question that I would get from people is how are you going to market it? It didn't ask me about the content of the book, right? They didn't ask me about the work that it got into. They didn't ask about what were the benefits of reading the book. What most people asked me in Los Angeles was, how are you going to market this book? Right? That's America. We're a very marketing-friendly country. A message that is being exported from America to Europe and Africa. So one of Nigeria's wealthiest pastors is this guy called David Oyadepo, who is said to be worth $150 million. We are not asking you to give so the church can be blessed. We're asking you to give so you can be blessed. Some fellow said, okay, I was worth $150 million. I said, that's an insult. $150 million, that's an insult. $150 million too small, that can't be. Do they know what they're doing? You know, a big part of me believes that Copeland and Dollar, they... Yes, they know what they're doing and they're very good at it. That's why they make so much money. They truly believe their intentions are good. Even for hundreds of millions of dollars, I can't imagine someone knowingly deceiving her other people without just driving themselves in... Why is this anymore deceiving than anyone else who promises people, if you take this supplement, you practice this workout technique, if you wear this suit, if you adopt this mindset, you'll be blessed. Saying in the long run, like, type of cognitive dissonance just seems too much to bear. I mean, how is this anymore of a scam than some therapist saying, oh, you really need to do the work in a couple of years of these weekly sessions, I really think that you'll have the life you want. But at the end of the day, I'm never gonna know what their intentions are. You know, I can only ever... It's silly to worry about their intentions. They don't even know what their intentions are. We don't even know what motivates people because we don't even know what motivates ourselves to even be concerned about their intentions. It's silly. It's juvenile. Everything you've presented so far, James, is that these people are open, honest, forthright, far more than most people are. See what the consequences of their actions are. And trust me, you haven't seen the worst of it yet. The consequences. Okay, for some people, these churches and these religious leaders are tremendous sources of hope and inspiration. And that anyone who suffers negative consequences from this type of message, they would suffer identical negative consequences if they went outside of religion because they're so gullible. Benny Hinn. Hinn is probably most well-known for what he calls his miracle crusades. Hinn claims to be able to perform miracles. He'll bring people to the stage with... And how is he so successful because he meets a need in these gullible, naive people for miracles, right? He's providing a service. With all sorts of illnesses and then with the touch of his hand, they will feel God's power running through them as they fall back and these catchers will catch them as they fall. Most diseases either cure themselves or they can't be cured, all right? So you go see a doctor. I remember I went to see a doctor because I had a sore left hip and this was your typical primary care physician. You didn't really know much about physical therapy. First of all, the way that he moved my leg around was terrible. He caused me more pain and discomfort and he said to me, well, just take a couple of aspirin and in a few years you'll need a hip replacement. Just terrible advice, right? I would have been far better served by going to a good physical therapist, which I ended up doing. I went to a good physical therapist and in one session he cured the problem. So another time I had elbow pain and they gave me some straps to reduce the pressure on my elbow and talked about surgery and I ended up going to an acupuncturist in four sessions of acupuncture, it cured the problem. So most of the things that people go to doctors for, doctors don't provide any benefit, right? Doctors can't provide benefit in some circumstances, right? You break a leg, doctors can provide benefit. If you need a blood test, doctors can provide a blood test, but many times people go to doctors for all sorts of ailments that cannot, we have no verifiable, we have no empirically backed cure for these ailments. And so too with these people who are going to Benny Hinn, right? They're looking for some kind of catharsis. They're looking to be touched by the divine and I don't see it as any more harmful than all those visits to a doctor where there is no medical cure for what's ailing people. You had Parkinson's for 15 years. Oh, thanks for that, Anani. Who are you? People in the audience will cheer. There are others who are stood there in awe with their hands raised in worship and Benny Hinn. And you're taking people into an ecstatic state and I wouldn't surprise me if people had breakthroughs. If people experienced like a genuine shift inside of themselves. Now, they're also tremendous dangerous to this. It's like a Tony Robbins event, like these large group awareness therapies are very dangerous. That goes for Tony Robbins. It goes for all sorts of secular, large group awareness therapies. It goes for yoga when it's large group awareness therapy and it also goes for religion. So I'm sure there are some benefits from this Benny Hinn clown show and I'm sure they're also tremendous downsides. But I don't see it as any more dangerous than a Tony Robbins seminar. Isn't the only one that does this, right? This is a really common practice amongst the prosperity gospel circles. Glory to God, you're not bound to this chair. The day will come, you'll walk out of it. In the name of Jesus. What is it that we're really seeing here? Is this an actual miracle? I would know that there were certain things that were completely deceptive. Miracle is in the eye of the beholder, right? For the truly religiously inclined, probably breath is a miracle, right? The ability to walk and to talk is a miracle. But for those so inclined, they see miracles everywhere. Kosti Hinn is the nephew of Benny Hinn and he's worked with his family sometimes as a catcher himself. In 2017, Kosti Hinn came forward with a testimony of his time spent in Benny Hinn's ministry. The responsibility is to look really good, look really blessed, sell the narrative, make all the money. That sounds like a whole lot of jobs, right? That sounds like a whole lot of secular jobs. That sounds like a car salesman jobs. That sounds like a job anytime you're representing some firm or some business, right? That's what you do, right? All sorts of people are sent to chiropractors. Chiropractors are useless, right? There's no empirical evidence that's strong for the benefits of chiropractic. Yet it's a multi, multi, multi billion dollar industry. And say, look at my life. If you give to this, if you follow it, if you obey it, and if you do what I say, God will do it for you too. He described the lifestyle that he had whilst working with his family. Most people would prefer a miracle happen to them rather than they having to do the hard work of transforming their lives. So this is a quick fix, quixotic offering that meets people's emotional needs and the type of people who are vulnerable to this are vulnerable to endless numbers of scams. Lived in a 10,000 square foot mansion guarded by a private gate, drove two Mercedes-Benz... Yeah, and how do they get to live in this luxury? They meet people's emotional needs, right? You meet people's needs, you make people happy, you can be rich, whether it's in religion or in a secular enterprise. And vehicles vacationed in exotic destinations and shopped at the most expensive stores. Costi Hin really believed in what he was doing. But he only had doubts when he started... Right, so most people aren't going to believe anything if it threatens their living, right? This is as true for university professors and lawyers and doctors and accountants, right? And business people and salesmen, right? If your living depends upon not understanding something, 99.9% of people aren't going to understand that, right? We all have blocks to protect our emotional comfort, to protect our way of life, to protect our living. There's nothing distinctive about this happening to religious people. At finding contradictions in what he was teaching and what he was finding in the Bible. Grace Broula was eight years old when she was featured on an episode of CBC's The Fifth State in 2005, an episode that was specifically investigating Hin's ministry. If you could have a miracle, what would you want it to be? That I could not. Just walk. Is that what you want, Grace? Just to walk. No, just to walk. And so just the hope of being able to walk is something that people would be often prepared to spend thousands of dollars, right? Hope is something real, right? People need hope. Life is hard. People need hope. People need fantasy. People need distraction. People need emotional comfort. And even if it doesn't literally work out, at least they got to experience something that was desperately important to them. Grace's mother brings her daughter to one of Hin's miracle crusades. And just as she's about to go to the stage, she's intercepted. And a question from the chat, have I gotten more or less religious lately? I think probably a little less over the past two years because I've not participated as much in religious community due to COVID. A little less. But now that COVID is waning, I'm back participating more in religious life. By what are called screeners who tell her to step aside. According to that documentary and an insider, the job of the screeners is to screen out the people that are severely sick and ill. There's the story of Justin Peters who is an evangelist himself and was born with cerebral palsy. During the fifth estate's investigation into Hin's ministry, they attempt to get Peters to go on stage as well. And just like Grace, he is also intercepted by the screeners. Our hidden camera shows Justin being stopped by a screener. Watch as Henry Hin whispers something to her. Then Justin is told to step aside. In another documentary from- And I didn't see what's so heinous about that. They're trying to provide an emotional catharsis for people and they see that some people are too sick to benefit or to appear to benefit from what the preacher has to offer. All right, lawyers don't take every case. Accountants don't take every client. Doctors sometimes throw up their hands and say, there's nothing I can do for you. From 2001, HPO were given full access to Hin's events and were even allowed to follow several cases of supposed miracle healings. These are people that actually managed to get onto the stage and claim they'd been healed. In one instance, the crew follows a boy called Ash Neal and his parents as they're desperate to have their child healed by one of Hin's miracles. I don't see, how is this any more heinous than the multi-multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry, right? The evidence for most pharmaceutical drugs for depression that they only have little above placebo level and possibly not even that, right? So we have this enormous industry shoveling out psychiatric drugs for depression and the evidence for these drugs is meager. In fact, there's considerable evidence that they do more harm than good, right? But that's blessed, right? Hundreds, thousands of doctors make money from prescribing anti-depressants. But the evidence for the benefits of these anti-depressants is negligible and all sorts of things that doctors recommend. Doctors performed tonsillectomies, took people's tonsils out for decades after it was widely known that most of these tonsillectomies were not a benefit to the people, but it was a whole industry. So doctors kept performing the surgery, they made money from performing the surgery even though it harmed the patient. Uverectomies, so usually taking a woman's ovaries out will decrease her lifespan and decrease her quality of life. But there's an enormous industry for performing this frequently unnecessary surgery. And then a lot of spinal surgery, completely unnecessary, does far more harm than good. A lot of back surgery, far more harm than good. But there's a whole industry that makes money from it. Chiropractic, multi-billion dollar industry, essentially a scam. Of course. We're expecting America. We're expecting America. The Prakash family are recent immigrants to America. 10-year-old Ashneel is their younger son. And I remember when I was living in Orlando, Florida, Benny Hinn was in that area. And I heard a lot of people talking about Benny Hinn. And when I was there in Orlando, there was this 10 out of 10 Sheila. She was just amazing. And then I found out she had Crohn's disease. And so my girlfriend said to her, oh yeah, you think she's amazing, but she's got Crohn's and you don't wanna be bothered by that, do you? And I was like, no, I don't. So I have no idea what happened to her. I sure hope she's still with us. So back to my main point, meaning is found in relationships, not in words. So if something random comes onto this chat and say, I love you, Luke, that doesn't mean anything to me. But let's say I got back in contact with my first love. And 40 years later, she says, you are my first love. Okay, that has meaning to me because it happens within the context of a relationship. But sometimes when someone says to me, I love you, it means nothing to me. Occasionally it means a great deal. Two massive brain tumors have reduced him to a vegetative state. We believe in God, we have faith. And there's nothing impossible for God. Later in the documentary, Ashnil's parents actually attend the crusade and they're brought on stage to have their child healed by Hinn himself. Hinn gets the crowd to raise their hands and then he places his hands on Ashnil's face and says, expect the miracle. Dear Jesus, the Lord's gonna touch you, young boy. Just that hope would be a tremendous source of blessing even if there's no physical change. After the event, Ashnil still wasn't healed. It didn't happen, I was not even discouraged. I know it's God's plan. You know, I can stake my life on Pastor Benny Hinn's word. Right, so the Pastor Benny Hinn is a tremendous source of inspiration, emotional comfort, guidance, makes these people feel connected to the transcendent. He is a channel for God, for these people, right? So, yeah, I think he's providing a real service to them. And God spoke to me last night at the Colosseum Center where the crusade was going on and he said, donate him another $2,000, and which I'm going to do it, I'm going to do that. Recently, I watched an event from Kenneth Copeland's Eagle Mountain Church, right? It's called Miracles on a Mountain. It's another miracle healing service. So I remember once I was listening to this marketing seminar, and the guy said, when you market, you don't market to the person as they are, you market to the person as a dream that they could be. So you don't market to the guy who's an insurance adjuster, you know, working behind a computer 40 hours a week. No, you market to the guy that he's a potential rock star or he's a potential sports star or he's a potential political star, right? So people's fantasies and people's emotional life and people's need for mystery and the transcendent is real. It's as real as their need for food. And in this instance, it was hosted by this evangelist called Billy Burke. And at one point, someone is brought out from the crowd. And I thought, hang on, I recognize this guy. It was big Nick, who, for those of you that don't know, was an ex-member of the popular social media group, the Vlog Squad, which is headed by David Dobrik. At the event, Nick tells Billy Burke about his blind eye. I'm blind in my left eye as well. I know that you told me that. Billy then attempts to cure his eye. Loosen that. After all the theatrics, Billy then starts to wiggle his finger around. And then... Nothing yet. Nothing yet. And Billy hears that and he continues like trying to help him. And then when he realizes it doesn't work, he then just tells Nick, recite chapters of the Bible every night for your eye to be cured. So John chapter nine, your confession starting tonight and every night. You hear me? Tonight and every night before you go to bed. You ready? I was blind in the... So how is this any different from, say, the karate kid where the kid wants to learn to be a master of karate and his teacher sets him to work buffing his car and cleaning his car because the same motions that go with, you know, rubbing in the car wax, they will be useful for karate. And so too, giving this guy instructions to, you know, repeat a chapter from the Bible, I didn't see a big downside to that. It's a form of training. It's a form of discipline. It's a form of grounding people in a comforting ritual. We need rituals and we need emotional comfort. No, I see. And the crowd cheers. It's like the miracle actually happened. It's been about seven months since that event took place and I've looked through Big Nick's social media account and there's no indication that his eye has healed since the event. So again, what are we witnessing when we... I remember I worked a lot of construction between 1985 and 1988 and I would listen to a lot of talk radio, mainly KGO radio and NPR on my Sony Walkman and in my car. And one day I was driving home, NPR was all things considered and Andre could rescue a poet from Eastern Europe and he was telling a story about how when he was a teenager, he really wanted to become a sculptor and he managed to get himself a apprentice to this sculptor who was very demanding. And so over the course of, say, six months, the sculptor put him through his paces and then finally the kid graduated and the kid said to the sculptor, okay, so what do I do now to make my dream of becoming a sculptor real? And the sculptor said, you're never gonna be a sculptor. You're gonna become a writer. So it's not weird that you go off on a tangent and let's say you just developed the practice of repeating a Bible verse to yourself every night. Well, the calming effect of that ritual, the discipline from that ritual, the community that you access that brought you to that ritual, the connections that you made that may well pay off in your life even if your blindness is not healed. We see things like this. If we are to believe that these people aren't just actors, which I really don't think that they are, what is actually happening? Consider this, if what we're seeing is real. What's happening is that people are getting their needs met. Men does not live on bread alone. We have emotional needs. We need comfort. We need connection. We need excitement. We need to feel like we're channeling the divine that we're reaching out and can touch the transcendent. That's what's happening here. Really, a miracle. Why don't these people go to hospitals and heal people there? Why do they need the lights and the cameras and the atmosphere and the theatrics to be able to do what they do? In 2011, Darren Brown ran this TV special program called Miracles for Sale. In this special program, Darren Brown, who is this... So I remember I was going through a difficult period of my life. I, in late 1997, decided to start writing an online unofficial biography of Dennis Prager. And in the process, I lost all my friends in Los Angeles because all my friends in Los Angeles, they were also connected to Dennis Prager and to me. They all chose Dennis Prager. They shunned me. They told me they'd shunned me before I set forth on this venture. And so I was feeling particularly lost and lonely. And then one day at a synagogue picnic, I was rushing the passer and a girl pushed me and blocked me and I fell to the ground and I broke a bone in my wrist. And I had to go in for surgery. And it was just a traumatic time. I'd been reporting on all these HIV cases in the porn industry and I was just receiving tremendous blowback. And I went into surgery. I walked to the hospital in Century City. I went into surgery and I came out of it. And I was given a cup of coffee to drink and I never drink coffee. And then I had a panic attack and they kept me in overnight and I just felt so desolate. And the next day they didn't want to release me because I didn't have anyone who'd come pick me up from the hospital. So eventually I got them to release me to a taxi driver and I got a taxi ride home and I went to the pharmacy to get pain medication which I don't think I ever needed or used but I was told to do that. So while I was waiting in line, this middle-aged woman said, I'm getting a special feeling about you. You should come see me. And she gives me her card and she's an astrologer. Now normally I would never go see an astrologer but I was feeling bereft. I was feeling lonely. I was feeling lost. I was feeling desperate. And I went to see her. And I went to see her and she said, well, what do you want most in the world? And I said, what I want most is to restore my friendship with Dennis Prager. And so she said, okay, let's see what we could do and she'd do the cards and all that. And I think it ended up costing me $20. And I went home from that first session with an astrologer and for the first and only time in my life I received an unsolicited email from Dennis Prager. So I'd posted on some board about what a comfort I found at Dennis Prager show. It was a source of emotional comfort. And Dennis Prager emailed me and said, please remember these words the next time for whatever reason you want to hurt me. I was like, wow, this astrology thing, this gypsy woman, it really works. Cause I've never received an unsolicited email from Dennis Prager before or since. Like he's responded to some of my emails over the years but he's never emailed me out of the blue. And so I ended up dropping about $900 on this astrologer over the next few weeks. Now I didn't get any more emails from Dennis Prager. I didn't get any more like concrete changes in my life but I was lonely, I was desperate. I was forlorn, I was struggling and I needed something. And she provided a genuine service for me. I felt connected to something. She gave me hope and inspiration and felt like I was connected to some force in the universe. So right on a strictly rational basis, I got ripped off by this fortune teller but she met my emotional needs. I received $900 worth of emotional servicing from this woman. Self-described mentalist and illusionist takes this ordinary individual called Nathan and attempts to turn him into a faith healer performing miracles in front of an audience. The idea behind the program was to expose the fact that what is happening here are not miracles, that it's just a product of psychology, the power of suggestion and- Miracles, it's all in the eye of the beholder, right, that I'm standing here and I'm giving my thoughts on life and 12 people are watching. Like from one perspective, that's a miracle, right? And my brother would say like, you know, why the hell would anyone wanna listen to you ramble about the dark world of mega churches? Misdirection. Now some aspects of faith healing are just pure trickery. A good example of this is the infamous leg-growing trick, the pre- Well, love can be trickery. Like I remember I got this really great feeling and then the next day I realized cause I've completely misunderstood what someone has said to me, right? So at least I got that day of an emotional high. So do I believe in the supernatural? I'm open to it. I don't believe or not believe. I mean, yeah, I believe in God. So yeah, to that extent, I believe in God. I hold the traditional beliefs of Orthodox Judaism, but I hold them lightly. I don't hold them dogmatically. Teacher Todd White is well known for walking around the streets and finding individuals who supposedly have one leg that is shorter than the other. And then miraculously, White will begin to grow out that person's leg right before our very eyes. Thank you. In Jesus' name. Left leg, I command you to grow. Right now, in Jesus' name. So a lot of people, eventually everybody has one leg that is shorter than the other because we all have a particular way that we stand. So most of us have a rotated right pelvis and then because the central nervous system works in a way that need to keep the eyes level, the back has to wrench to keep your eyes level. So most people walk around with a rotated right pelvis and a raised left shoulder and is it the... So I think the left leg then is longer than the right leg. So that's very common. And so when you adjust someone or you help them to release that unnecessary tension, that unnecessary muscular holding pattern, yeah, then the leg length can restore. So there's this procedure that I like to do that I like to just lie on the floor, put my legs up on a chair, and then I take my head and I take like with my right hand, I'm gonna rotate my head in a clockwise direction. And then with my left hand, I'm gonna rotate my head in a counterclockwise direction. And so when I do this and I'm lying on the floor and with my feet up on a chair, it helps to even out my hips. And I feel it just kind of realigning my hip length because when one leg is longer than the other, it distorts your whole musculature and it makes you much more vulnerable to back problems and just move much less efficiently and you operate much less efficiently. Brown teaches Nathan to do this exact trick because it's not a miracle. The leg growing trick is infamously used by charlatans throughout history. In fact, a quick Google or YouTube search would demonstrate how it can be done in several ways, one of which involves shifting the other person's shoes to make it seem... So when I do an Alexander Technique lesson and I have someone lie on a table and I locate and help to release unnecessary tension in people, then I can often coax the shorter leg to grow in length because all that's happening is that people are letting go of their muscular tension pattern of holding around the hip and that joint, which is repressing the length of their leg. As though a leg is being grown. If you speed up the Todd White clip of him performing this miracle and you just play it back and forth, you can literally see what Todd White is doing. But a big part of faith healing isn't just tricks like this. In fact, a lot of it is rooted in a deeper part of who we are as people. By the end of Darren Brown's special, Nathan is able to perform in front of a small audience of believers and you can see that he too is able to with just the touch of his hand. Okay, some questions in the chat. What do I think of synchronicity? I'm open to it. I don't have any strong feelings about it. What do I think about the future of Iran and its eschatology? I'm not sure. Do these type of preachers exist outside of the US? Yes, they do. They're not as common in Australia and Europe as they are in the US, but these type of preachers are growing in power and influence in Latin America and in Africa. What do I think about the Ron Jeremy case? I haven't really thought about Ron Jeremy. Yeah, a lot of the frustration at these prosperity gospel teachers is just misdirected frustration at dumb people. Yeah, I agree. Okay, let's get a little Peter Zion on the situation in Odessa. Peter Zion here coming to you from Colorado. I want to give you an idea of what is coming up in the Russia-Ukraine war for the next couple of weeks. There's obviously a lot of shelling going on around Krakow and Kiev and I don't mean to take away from the importance of those two fronts. From a strategic and a political point of view, they are clearly what's going on, but there is a broader strategic picture as well as an economic picture that a lot of folks are missing and that is all down in the South. So for the last eight days of the war, the Russians have been trying to link up their forces in Crimea with their forces that were in the Southeast in those separatist regions around Luhansk and Donetsk. Those forces have met in a pincher movement at the city of Maripole, which has now been subjected to a weak straight of heavy shelling. The Russians did a false flag operation, I'm sorry, not a false flag operation. The Russians did a fake peace agreement that would have allowed several tens of thousands of people from Maripole to evacuate civilians and as soon as they concentrated, the Russians restarted the shelling trying to kill as many people as possible, which I think tells you everything you need to know about the seriousness of peace talks as far as the Russians are concerned. Now why this matters is if Maripole falls, then there will be nothing to stop the Russians from sending the regular forces in Russia proper through those secessionist regions by Maripole into Crimea and then further west. Now the forces in Crimea have already captured the town of Kyrgyzstan, although direct control seems a little muddled right now, and they are pushing further to the Northwest, to city of Mykolaev. And if they capture Mykolaev, there will be nothing standing between them and what is going on in Odessa. Odessa is the commercial capital. It's the most economically vibrant city in Ukraine. It sits near the mouth of the Nista River, which is kind of the Ukrainian equivalent of the Mississippi. And as such, it is Ukraine's single largest wheat loading facility. In fact, it's arguably the largest one by volume in the world. Pretty much all of the agricultural exports that come out of, excuse me, that come out of Ukraine go through Odessa. So if it is subjected to the same level of destruction that the Russians are visiting on every other Russian population center that they visit, that is the end of Ukraine's participation in large scale agriculture period. The Ukrainians are not gonna be able to plant this year because the Russians are systematically destroying every town they come across. It will just be impossible for the farmers to do what they need to do. Now that's important enough as it is from an economic point of view and for what it means for global food supplies, but it's actually part of the Russian strategic goal here. Not necessarily to remove Ukraine from the equation in agricultural markets, but instead to push further to the West. You see, the Russians aren't doing this because Putin is power mad. They're doing this because they're trying to secure the gateway geographies that give access to the Russian portions of the European plane. There are nine of them, but two of them are adjacent to Ukraine. The one in question when it comes to Odessa is further to the West and Southwest. It's called the Bessarabian Gap and it is the direction that the Turks have used to invade Russia on multiple occasions through the two countries histories. So when the war comes to Odessa, I expect that Russian troops that are stationed in Moldova in a separatist enclave called Transnistra are going to join in that assault and then you will have Russian troops going all the way from the Russian Western frontier through Ukraine into Moldova proper and I do not expect them to stop. As soon as they figure out that their supply lines are as secure as they can be, I expect the Russians to cross the river into Moldova proper and then keep pushing until they've taken the entire country. Moldova controls about half of the Bessarabian Gap, but in order to get it all, the Russians can't stop there. They need to continue into NATO member Romania and push south until they reach the access between the two Romanian cities of, I'm gonna try to not butcher these pronunciations, Fokcani and Brella. Once they have those, they'll have fully plugged the Bessarabian Gap, but that does mean coming into conflict with NATO down the line. So Moldova will fall very easily. This is a country of less than three million people. Their primary exports are few agricultural outputs and some wine. They don't have the political much less military wherewithal to resist a Russian assault. I would expect all of Moldova to fall within a week or two. Ukraine or when you get into Romania, of course, though, that gets a little bit more dicey. So a couple of things to look for. First of all, while Kyrgyzstan has fallen and while Mikhailov is in danger and is under assault, there's only one bridge across the river that goes through Mikhailov. So if that bridge is destroyed, the Russians are gonna have to go a couple hundred miles north and loop back around. That would cost them a lot of time that I don't think they think they have. Second, once they link up with their forces in Transnistra, there are only a couple of bridges that cross the Nister River going into Moldova proper. So the same logic holds. So those are kind of the flash points that you should be looking at because if anyone wants to really kick the Russians in the teeth and slow down these assaults, those two bridges need to fall. So we're not to the point yet where the Ukrainians are sabotaging their own infrastructure in order to deter the Russians, but I can't imagine that that is far off. Okay, that's Peter Zion in Colorado. Elliot Blatt writes in the chat. How can the Russians succeed with all those Ukrainian flags on people's Facebook profiles? Yuval Harari, Israeli academic, says the war in Ukraine could change everything. The Russian people who won this war, there's really just a single person who by his decisions created this strategy. So one of the things that has come back in the last weeks and months is the nuclear threat is moved back into the center of political and strategic considerations. Putin has talked about it several times. The other day, you're the Russia's nuclear forces on a higher alert status. President Zelensky himself at the Munich Security Conference essentially said that Ukraine had made a mistake in abandoning the nuclear weapons it had inherited from the Soviet Union. And that's a statement that I suspect many countries are pondering. What's your thinking about the return of the nuclear threat? It's extremely frightening. You know, it's like, it's almost Freudian. It's the return of the repressed. We thought, oh, nuclear weapons, yes, there was something about that in the 1960s with the Cuban Missile Crisis and Dr. Strangelove. But no, it's here. And you know, it took just a few days of difficulties on the battlefield for suddenly, I mean, I'm watching television in like the news and you have these experts explaining to people what different nuclear weapons will do to this city or to this country. It rushed back in. So you know, nuclear weapons are in a way they also until now preserved the peace of the world. I belong to the School of Thought that if it was not for nuclear weapons, we would have had the Third World War between the Soviet Union and the United States and NATO sometime in the 1940s, in the 1950s or 60s. That nuclear weapons actually until today served a good function. It's because of nuclear weapons that we did not have any more direct clashes between superpowers because it was over. Wow, Visa Mastercard account for three quarters of payments in Russia and they are suspending transactions in Russia. Yes, that this would be collective suicide. But the danger is still there is always there. If there is miscalculation, then the results would of course be existential, catastrophic. And at the same time, in the 70s after Cuba and Berlin and so in the 60s, when the 70s, we started building a sort of international institutional architecture that helped reduce the risk of military conflict. Okay, can liberalism survive the state of exception? I want to talk about that in a minute, but my DGI pocket two creator kit. It's a lot easier than my iPhone. So I can just put this in my pocket and we'll see what the technical quality is. So reading this book, once again, Religion and Secular Society and talks about the rise of the film industry. So primary purpose historically for religion was to provide emotional reassurance. But now people often find that they get emotional reassurance in more effective ways such as going to the movies. So one of the definitions of a studio film is that a studio film confirms your understanding of how the world works. In other words, it provides emotional reassurance. And so people often find a lot more emotional reassurance more viscerally and more quickly from going to the movies than from going to church. So it used to be that religion met the need for emotional reassurance, that the people were troubled by life and they needed reassurance and there was a common feeling that religion would tap into. But now as society becomes increasingly individualized, as we have more individualized professions, we have more individualized circumstances and experiences, we're becoming individuated to use the academic term, then there's no longer that reservoir of common feeling for religion to tap into. So since the 19th century, we've had the explosion of a Belt and Shown, a secular worldview, the expansion of science. Science proves itself in the eyes of men and it leads to new pragmatic tests for ideological systems. So when religion says, oh, there's no conflict between religion and science, religion is essentially saying we don't wanna compete with science. Religion is saying essentially that science is one. So the technical achievements of the entertainment industry of movies and videos like this, that's sufficient to confer interest and stimulate enthusiasm. Now what I'm doing and what movies do on TV, it's detached from the agencies of social control. So religion used to work for social control. And the industry I'm in right now is incredibly competitive and profit seeking. So from the outset, the entertainment industry, the movie industry, appealed to immediate appetites and emotions. So religion doesn't offer that quick fix. So there's never any inbuilt or implicit restraint about what movies and TV and videos might offer. It's not in the service of any particular class or nation or political or government agency. So YouTube is ideologically uncommitted, the medium of video, not YouTube, the business. All right, so people who make videos prepared to test the market to discover what people would pay to see as entertainment. They prepare to defy social convention and accept immorality and it's in the interest of profit to do so and until government interference might occur. So the entertainment industry has been from the outset a challenge to religion. It offers diversion, more viscerally and quickly than religion. It offers new interpretations of daily life. It provides new sources of emotional reassurance and the entertainment industry competes with the time, attention and money of the public. So spending time with entertainment is not just an alternative way of spending time. It's also an alternative set of moral values. So it's replaced religion's attempt to awaken public sentiments by offering titillation of private emotions. So, overwhelmingly the entertainment industry has proved more viscerally compelling than organized religion. So as we've had the expansion of literacy. But the mega churches that were showing earlier in the show, they provide something of the entertainment value of Hollywood. The development of the secular press and the cinema, radio and TV. The church and the synagogue and the mosque have steadily lost their monopoly on information and their dominance of communication industry. So it used to be public communication was largely from the pulpit. Why notices, appended to the church door. Remember, Martin Luther attached his 99 theses to the church door. That used to be how you communicated. Prior to the 19th century, intellectual simulation was almost always religious exhortation. But 19th and 20th centuries have seen the erosion of the church's influence as a source of information. So the clergy have become one of several voices with divergent religious messages. Okay, here's a historian Jerry Z. Mueller. A naive view of human nature. Overestimating the extent to which government could function based on rules and procedures alone. And overestimating the degree to which politics was based on reason discussion. Life was too unruly for that, Schmitt thought. And liberalism with its rationalist bias that all problems could be solved by discussion and its emphasis on adhering to proper procedures at all cost was therefore intellectually inadequate and politically faulty. It failed to account for the fact that there were exceptional situations in which sticking to the existing laws and procedures might be fatal to the polity. As in the case of incipient civil war. Liberalism failed, according to Schmitt, failed to recognize that on such occasions there was a need for decisions that could not be reduced to following approved procedures. And the most important decision that needed to be made was when such a state of emergency in Auschwitz-Zustand actually existed. So for Schmitt, that was the real meaning of sovereignty. What individual or what body was empowered to decide on the state of exception? Now that's not the part that interested Talbus. Schmitt tied this political argument to a historical one that particularly interested Jakob Talbus. Schmitt- So Jakob Talbus was a Jewish and a historian of religion, not practicing Orthodox Judaism or any form of Judaism itself, but a historian who became friendly with Carl Schmitt between about 1977 and prior to Carl Schmitt dying in 1985. And it inspired Jakob Talbus to publish his final book on the apostle Paul and this academic Jerry Z. Mueller. He has a book coming out on Jakob Talbus in a few months. And I'm quoting here in English though. All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts, unquote. So he argued, for example, that there was an intrinsic connection between early modern deism and liberal constitutionalism. Just as the deists believed that God created the world with its own laws and didn't require further divine intervention in the form of miracles. So liberals believed that government could be constituted by a set of rules and procedures alone. And just as deists denied the need for or the possibility of miracles, enlightened thinkers and their liberal heirs believed that personal decision and the suspension of legal rules had no place in a proper functioning state. The flip side of this for Schmitt was that there was some sort of analogy and Schmitt was very vague on what this was between the religious belief in God's ability to perform miracles and the political sovereign's ability to intervene and suspend the normal institutional rules. So a lot of the energy that people used to put into religion they're now putting into art or yoga or political activism. So interesting article here in the Wall Street Journal. The two blunders that caused the Ukraine war, Robert Service, a leading historian of Russia, says Moscow will win the war but will lose the peace and fail to subjugate Ukraine. How Putin could be deposed. Well, I don't think Russia needs to subjugate Ukraine all they need to do is wreck Ukraine. And I expect that Russia will take those bits of Ukraine that it wants such as near the Black Sea. They'll take the tasty portions of Eastern Ukraine and then they'll be content with wrecking the rest of Ukraine and it will serve as a solid warning to Ukraine that should not align with the West or Moscow will come in again and wreck them again. The two blunders that caused the Ukraine war. Robert Service, a leading historian of Russia, says Moscow will win the war but will lose the peace and fail to subjugate Ukraine. How Putin could be deposed. By Tunku Vardarjian. March 4th, 2022, 107 p.m. Eastern time. The Russian invasion of Ukraine resulted from two immense strategic blunders, Robert Service says. The first came on November 10th when the U.S. and Ukraine signed a charter on strategic partnership which asserted America's support for Kiev's right to pursue membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The pact made it likelier than ever that Ukraine would eventually join NATO and intolerable prospect for Vladimir Putin. It was the last straw, Mr. Service says. Preparations immediately began for Russia's so-called special military operation in Ukraine. Mr. Service, 74, is a veteran historian of Russia, a professor emeritus at St. Anthony's College, Oxford and a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. He has written biographies of Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky. The last work, published in 2009, attracted the ire of diehard Trotsky at its worldwide for saying that their hero shared many basic ideas with Lenin and Stalin on the one party, one ideology terror state. Mr. Service says they still mess around his Wikipedia entry. The November agreement added half to the looser assurances Ukraine received at NATO summit five months earlier that membership would be open to the country at met the alliance's criteria. Mr. Service characterizes these moves as shambolic mismanagement by the West, which offered Ukraine encouragement on the NATO question but gave no apparent thought to how such a tectonic move away from Moscow would go down with Mr. Putin. Nothing was done to prepare the Ukrainians for the kind of negative response that they would get. After all, Mr. Service says Ukraine is one of the hotspots in the mental universe of Vladimir Putin, and you don't wander into it without a clear idea of what you're going to do next. The West has known that since at least 2007, when the Russian ruler made a speech at the Munich Conference on Security Policy that was, in Mr. Service's words, a rage against Ukraine ever joining NATO, he was about to step down from the Russian presidency to become Prime Minister for four years, so it was his last lion's roar in the jungle. When he returned as president in 2012, he made it clear again that the Ukraine NATO question wasn't negotiable. In July, 2021, he wrote an essay that foretold the invasion. Mr. Service sums it up as saying, more or less, that Ukrainians and Russians are one people. Mr. Putin had said so many times before, but not as angrily and punchily and emotionally. It rankles Mr. Putin that Ukraine would seek to join the West, and not merely because he wants it is a satellite state. He also can't afford to allow life to a neighboring Slav state, which has even a smidgen of democratic development. Okay, that will do.