199 - Charles Cornish-Dale (Raw Egg Nationalist) on Nietzsche, Vitalism, and Christian Masculinity

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Guest: Dr. Charles Cornish-Dale ("Raw Egg Nationalist")

The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity (Amazon) — hardcover, Kindle, and audiobook - https://amzn.to/4w7aJvl

Summary

What if the crisis of modern masculinity isn't only spiritual — but biological? Chase sits down with Dr. Charles Cornish-Dale — the Oxford- and Cambridge-trained historian known online as Raw Egg Nationalist — to talk through his provocative new book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity. They trace Charlie's unlikely path from medieval church historian to one of the most influential voices in the MAHA movement, and dig into his central thesis: that liberalism itself is a low-testosterone system, that endocrine disruptors and processed food are quietly reshaping men, and that Francis Fukuyama's "last man" is now a physiological reality. Along the way they wrestle with the Christian temptation to divorce body from soul, Nietzsche's critique of Christianity as a slave morality, the guilty conscience, Christian vitalism, and whether the church still has the vitality to fight. Whether you're deep in this conversation already or skeptical of the whole thing, this one will sharpen you.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Welcome back to another episode of Foolproof Theology. My name is Chase Davis. I'm your host, and I'm glad you're here. Today I'm sitting down with Dr. Charles Cornish Dale, a man a lot of you may know as Raw Egg Nationalist. He's an Oxford and Cambridge trained historian. He was the star of Tucker Carlson's documentary, The End of Men, alongside RFK Jr., and he's recently released a new book with a provocative title called The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity. We get into all of it, his strange path from medieval church historian to one of the most influential voices in the Maha movement featured on Tucker Carlson. In fact, though the way I kind of found out about The Last Men as a book was actually listening to Ezra Klein's podcast of all places with the New York Times. They were giving it a review over there on their podcast, and they they really failed to grasp the topics in it. And I was like, I've got to reach out to this guy because I want to hear more. Turns out we have a lot we write about that overlaps. So if you've read Offensive Christianity, The Last Men really overlaps with that. We're going to talk about the Maha movement, why he thinks liberalism itself is a low testosterone system. We're going to talk about endocrine disruptors, Fukuyama, Nietzsche, Christian vitalism, and whether Christianity has the vitality left to fight. So you're really going to enjoy this episode. Before we get into that, I want to make sure you know about a few things coming up. First of all, if you haven't signed up for Commonplace, you're missing out. Commonplace is a website that I launched to do serious theological work, whether it's sermon prep, writing, or research, or even if you're just a layman interesting in better sources and better material, better commentaries than you're going to get on the mass market and in Christian Bible software and other places. Commonplace is an AI-powered research assistant built on more than 400, I think we're up to 600 Reform and Puritan primary sources. So we're talking Calvin, Owen, kind of what you expect, but also Turretan Spurgeon, the Westminster Standards, and even Latin scholastics that have been translated into English for the first time ever. It's all grounded in actual sources with real citations. There's not a lot of, in fact, there's zero, uh, AI hallucinations. There's no nonsense. It's like having the best theological library in the world, plus a research assistant who's ready to help you out. So go to commonplace.study. You can sign up for a free 14-day trial today. Check it out. Let me know what you think. Start digging around. I think it's a great resource. I'm using it this week to preach through Proverbs on parenting. And so I'm going to get into commonplace and uh do it, use it for sermon research. But I use it all the time to ask any kind of theological questions just to point me back to good sources. Second, for the men, I want to invite you personally to burn the ships. Burn the ships is the annual men's conference of the Well Church and Boulder. And it's uh held July 31st to August 2nd. It's going to be a great time. We're going to have Dr. Stephen Wolfe and Dr. Joe Rigney out. I'll be speaking. So will Pastor Matt Patrick. It's a great time to get together. We're having a men's workout on Saturday morning. You're going to have to register and then RSVP for that because we have limited spots available. But with your ticket, you get food, a concert, and get to network with other guys. You're really not going to want to miss it. Head to boulderwell.org slash burnthep. Sign up today. Register today and come learn and uh really enjoy a time that's more uh less public, you might say, because we actually don't publish a lot of these talks. We we want it to be a more conversational environment uh where people can speak their mind freely and not have free of any uh fear of any kind of press or anything like that. But we're not doing it for publicity, we're doing it to equip you to be a strong, courageous man today. So sign up for Burn the Ships today. And then finally, uh this conversation we're gonna have with Rogue Nationals today overlaps with a lot of the book that I wrote, Offensive Christianity, like I mentioned already. You need to go pick up the book. If you have not picked up the book, I don't know what you're doing. Um, you know, you need to go pick it up today. Offensive Christianitybook.com is where you can find copies, leave a review wherever you uh well now listen. You can listen to the book. I read it to you. I've I've for those who are you know into Audible and and uh listening to books, I myself have read you the book. You can go find that on Audible. You can also pick it up uh at offensive Christianitybook.com. So go buy a copy, leave a review, let me know what you think. And I'm hearing all sorts of great reviews coming in, everyone from police officers to pastors, just men in their industries and vocations, giving it out to other guys, feeling inspired. I recently got a great review from an older retired SBC pastor uh who wrote that it really inspired him, and this is the book we need for men today. So I think you're really gonna enjoy it. But with that said, let's get into our conversation with Dr. Charles Cornish Dale. But uh Charles, thanks for coming on the show today.

SPEAKER_01 4:47

It's a pleasure. I'm really looking forward to it.

SPEAKER_00 4:50

So, Charles, you know, I've I've been kind of keeping up with some of your work after seeing you on Tucker. Obviously, the book you written, uh, we were kind of touching on a lot of the same topics, and so I wanted to start a conversation and have a conversation with you about the book. Before we get into that, I discovered something about you that I don't know how public it is, but you are a doctor, you have a PhD, and you actually did your dissertation, I think at Oxford, and kind of early medieval theology. Can you tell me more about that?

SPEAKER_01 5:19

Well, so yeah, so I did a I I read uh I read for a D Phil in history at Oxford from 2015 to 2018. I was at Lincoln College. Uh I was supervised by uh Professor Dermot McCulloch, Sir Dermot McCulloch, who was the big uh I think he's retired now, but he was the professor of the history of Christianity, real big, real big figure in church history, uh, you know, one of one of the like the big guys at Oxford in the history department. Uh and my PhD, my D fill was about the Reformation. Uh it was the Reformation in a long jury, which is the you know the um phrase that's associated with the Annal school. Uh, you know, where you look at um where you look at things over a long period of time, basically. So what I was doing was I was looking at the Reformation on a local level in one parish that had uh in Dorset, which is my native county, in Dorset, uh in England rather, and um uh was looking at this one parish has an amazing medieval records, and so I could I could look at um religious life before the Reformation, through the Reformation, and kind of after. Uh and I was asking questions like, you know, how much how much actually really changed, you know, because I mean we we tend to think of the Reformation as this you know monumental event, a cataclysm maybe, or a you know, a wonderful liberation, but it was a bit it was a big thing, and you know, it it saw it saw momentous changes to religious life, it fractured Christendom, it set England on its unique path to to kind of world historical greatness, etc. Um, but what was it actually like on a on a on the level of a parish? You know, how much did how much did religious life change in this one community, Wimborne Minster in East Dorset? And um it was it was really it was I mean it was incredibly interesting. I I was very inspired by the work of Eamon Duffy. I don't know if you're familiar are you familiar with Eamon Duffy? So Aman Duffy. I'm not no he wrote uh I think it was 1994, he wrote a book called The Stripping of the Altars, that was about uh the Reformation in England, and it was kind of uh the beginning of a sort of revisionist um approach to the Reformation in England. He argued that actually late medieval Christianity was uh wasn't moribund, it wasn't kind of ripe for Reformation, uh it was uh it had a lot of life to it, people were very in ordinary parishioners were very involved in in religion, there was a common religious culture uh among all levels of society, it wasn't like there was there wasn't kind of a split between elite um literate religious culture and uh kind of lower lay devotional culture. Um uh so he he very much presented the Reformation as a kind of cataclysm in England. Uh but then he wrote another book that was that was much more of an inspiration for me called The Voices of Moorbath, which was a study of one parish, a very small parish on the edge of Exmoor, which is quite a kind of wild area of the West Country, a small rural parish which has uh very, very interesting medieval records, church wardens' accounts, which are records of um spending on on the kind of day-to-day religious life of the parish, maintenance of the church, unglamorous stuff, but it but also uh recording you know various payments and and changes that are associated with the Reformation. Um uh but it was the kind of um uh the the kind of model that he used of a of a kind of rich, almost novelistic account of uh one community's journey through the Reformation led by its priest, uh by the parish priest, that really kind of inspired me to do something similar with Wimborne Minster and to try to write uh uh to try to write an account of the Reformation that really sort of um focused on the human interest of the Reformation. So ordinary people's experience of of these momentous changes. Um I mean there were a lot there was a lot of number crunching in there because I was using financial records like church wardens accounts and that kind of stuff. So there were graphs about you know expenditure on maintenance of the church and payments for seating in the church, trends over long periods, gifts to the church in bequests in people's wills and all that kind of stuff, you know, like long-term trends that you could actually use to chart, you know, well, long-term trends, you know, you could you could look at well, were people giving more money to the church after the Reformation or before and that kind of stuff, but then there was also uh uh kind of um a lot of evidence, wills in particular, other stuff that allowed me really to get very close to ordinary people and what they were doing and their relationships within the community and all this kind of stuff. So um it was uh yeah, it was uh it was an interesting, quite unusual uh project. I mean, I used medieval records that basically no one had ever touched. So I was antiquarians had touched them and catalogued them a little bit, written about them in in obscure local journals and stuff like that, but nobody had used these medieval records as the basis for a for a full-length study. So it was it was exciting and it was a real privilege actually, you know, to be able to use these amazing records that that started in four, I mean, the church wardens accounts, some of the earliest in England started in 1403. Um amazing, amazing, um uh exciting uh and that that's actually one thing that I do miss is I do miss going into an archive and you know being the first person to to properly handle a medieval will or a or a church wants to count something. That that that's the really exciting part actually of doing academic history for me, or it was.

SPEAKER_00 11:52

Yeah, no, it can be very exciting. I mean, in America, we don't have that long of a history when it comes to churches, but even in my context of Boulder, you can go into these older churches and you see the registries, and it can be very exciting because nobody pays attention to those. And it's like if if these, especially the liberal churches, would remember their history and remember who they were, uh, there's such an account and a testimony of faithful witnesses who have gone before us. It almost feels like when you're in the archives doing that kind of work, you're like Indiana Jones discovering something uh for the first time. So I totally get the appeal. With your particular work, was it more of like I want to get a uh I want to get the D fill from Oxford and I've got to figure out a topic to address, or was this coming from somewhere else? You wanted to be an academic, you wanted to be a church historian. What drove you to do that?

SPEAKER_01 12:36

Uh I I mean, I I think I I've always loved history. I was always, always, always very good at history and very interested in history when I was at school, and I naturally went on to study history then at university. Uh, I had a few years out from university. I left Cambridge and and had a few years off, but I was kind of I mean, there was parts of me that just didn't want to have a normal job, you know. Like I didn't I didn't particularly want to go into the world of work. I did want to to write and research and and get and indulge in my intellectual interests. Um uh I mean I had the project um uh before I went to Oxford, you know, because that's what you when you apply for a doctorate, then that's what you have to do. You have to have some kind of project and you put it forward uh as part of your application and your allocated funding or not on the basis I got a full scholarship, full academic scholarship on the basis of the project, so I didn't have to pay for anything, which was nice. Um I mean, I suppose I probably did do the PhD thinking, yeah, I'm gonna continue and I'm gonna become an academic or try to become an academic. I mean, I wasn't really under any illusions about uh the direction in which academia is tending, and certainly, I mean, so as a postgraduate initially, I did I changed from uh history to social anthropology when I was at Cambridge. I studied um I studied uh social anthropology, I did a master an M Phil in social anthropology, and then I actually started a PhD at Cambridge in social anthropology. I was still writing about gonna research Buddhism, uh go to the Far East, live in a in a Buddhist monastery, which I did very briefly, and then I I hated it. Um uh but I mean uh social anthropology, unlike history, is a very radical leftist. I mean, a really like one of probably one of the most rabidly left disciplines, actually, um, in the academy. And I mean, I I transferred from history to anthropology thinking, oh, it's gonna be like Evans Pritchard, it's gonna be like, you know, uh these sort of gentleman explorers going to Africa in the 1930s, writing about strange customs and witchcraft and asking questions about rationality and you know, stuff like that. But actually, anthropology now as a discipline is about, you know, like studying transgender activist groups in in Italy and refugee theatre companies in Germany and stuff. And uh, I mean it's incredible, it's it's it's a discipline that's basically at war with itself and certainly at war with its own history, you know. I mean, uh the standard viewpoint that is taught, and certainly that's taught at Cambridge, is that anthropology before 1960 or 1970 was an irredeemably racist discipline. Um, it was a handmaiden of colonialism, and if you learn anything about the the discipline before 1970, it's that, you know, like you don't need to read Evans Pritchard, you don't really need to read Levi-Strauss, you don't need to read Malinovsky, um, you know, all that stuff is bunk. Uh, and it was only when we had this sort of colonial critique, as they call it, and the arrival of postmodern theory and all this other kind of stuff that um that actually, you know, anthropology started to uh started to bit to sort of uh move in the right direction. So I mean I I I I had had a a taste of the humanities at their most radically left wing, and I didn't really like it very much. I mean I I thought that going to Oxford and and just studying medieval history, you know, I would be immune from that. But I it was actually quite surprising uh how similar the disciplines were. And in fact, what was what was kind of worse about it in a way at Oxford was that history was was kind of further behind the curve than anthropology. So stuff that you know was was supposedly exciting in anthropology 10 or 15 years before was just kind of coming into history, the kind of same kind of left-wing theory, um uh, but it was all newfangled and everyone was really excited about it. Um, and I mean I think universities in general um aren't particularly um good places to be a European man, you know, like um so I was I was probably at a disadvantage in certain respects. Anyway, and then I mean my project, which was actually was a very, very kind of scholarly project. You know, it was it was rooted in uh an archive, a source base. You know, you I I I mean I was a very good Latinist, I've I've let my skills slip a bit, but you know, you have to be a paleographer, you have to be able to read old script. Um uh, you know, I mean it was a it was a scholarly project, it was an old school project rooted in sources, empirical evidence first, maybe a bit of theory on top, but certainly not being led by theory. Whereas actually the kind of the kind of stuff that actually really now gets you ahead in your career is stuff that intersects intersects much more with present-day concerns about identity and race and gender and all this kind of stuff. And so uh I was kind of at a double disadvantage, not only who I who I who I am, but also the fact that actually I'm doing like old school scholarship rather than something that's trendy, that uses French theory, that's about gender or disabilities or you know, all of those things. And so um as my project progressed as I was researching and writing the the D fill, then I did I did get a very, very clear sense that I would not be able to get a job. And I mean I did apply for some jobs, but uh as my as my defill came to an end, but I mean it was yeah, I did I didn't get a postdoctoral position or anything like that. So um uh that was you know that that required me then to pivot. Uh and I mean I I went back into um kind of job in the the literary industry that I had had before, and uh then I started posting on Twitter and and some very strange some very strange things started to happen.

SPEAKER_00 19:07

Right. Yeah, the my next question was gonna be how does a sensitive young man who is interested in being an academic uh turn into uh you know a character on Twitter known as Raw Egg Nationalist? And I'll make sure to put a link for those who don't follow if you want to follow uh Charles on on Twitter. But but you know, what was that turn like? Was it um kind of a radical change for you? Did the academy kind of radicalize you and kind of uh so to speak and and kind of um uh inculcate this this desire to create a persona online? Or did you get into health all of a sudden randomly in your you know D-fill? What was it that kind of spurred your interest in that?

SPEAKER_01 19:45

Well, yes, I mean uh health has been a big focus for me. I mean, I as as the Royal Nationalist, I mean I was always a sportsman at school. I played rugby, football, athletics, uh was a martial arts instructor in my late teens, uh, taught kickboxing and competed a little bit. So uh I've always cared about my physical fitness and my health. I've always enjoyed sports. Um so that that in itself wasn't so much of a departure. I mean uh being at being at Oxford, I think, around 2016, I so I started my PhD and ID Phil in 2015 and ended it in 2018, handed it in. Um that was a very interesting time to be at university. And yeah, in in in many respects, it did make me much more explicitly political than I had been. I mean, I I grew up in the countryside, I grew up in Dorset, very rural part of England, very conservative part of England. Uh I would describe my parents as as conservative by inclination. Uh I grew up around, you know, in a beautiful countryside, loads of history everywhere, medieval churches, um uh even older history, even older stuff than medieval, you know. Um so I mean I I always had a great appreciation and reverence for the past, for England's past. So, I mean, it was all there, I think, in embryo. I I I but I would say that yes, being at Oxford around the time of the European Union referendum, Brexit, and then Donald Trump uh really did start to make me think much more explicitly about who I was in opposition to all of these crazy people that I was that I'd been thrown in with, who I just felt this like instinctual revulsion towards. I mean, it was really like people's behaviour when Donald Trump was elected, for example, in Oxford, it was crazy. It was in it was mad, absolutely mad. Um uh I can remember in my so this was my set it was. The beginning of my second year, uh, and I was living in a house with this guy who was he was a weird guy. It was a nice house, but he I was sharing it with this weird guy, and he was like a card-carrying Trotskyist. He was he was a real he was he was he would go after what after you know in the evening to these like socialist workers party meetings and stuff. Yeah. And I can remember going to to bed on the night of of the election and just thinking, oh yeah, I'm sure Hillary Clinton's probably gonna win. And then uh I came down in the morning and you know, was having a coffee and turned on my laptop and whatever, and oh my god, Donald Trump has won. Uh, I'm sat there, like, you know, laughing my ass off about it, watching clips and stuff, and the young Turks watching them freak out and all that kind of stuff. And this chap I'm I'm living with comes downstairs. I can hear him sloping down the stairs. And he comes in the kitchen, and honestly, he he looked like he had seen his entire family murdered in front of him or something, like no colour in his face at all, genuinely like a ghostly pallor. Uh, and he says to me, Oh, Charlie, this is I can't believe this. This is so terrible. Um, what's what's happening? This is you know, and I say, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, Michael, yeah, it's yeah, it's dreadful, isn't it? He you know, he slopes off, goes on his bike, or whatever, and I'm just sat there for the whole day laughing, watching Donald Trump clips. But um, I mean, we were getting we were getting welfare emails, I remember. So the the college chaplain, so each college has uh has a priest basically who um you know uh does services in the church but also is responsible for student welfare. And um we got a welfare email from the chaplain. My door is open, this is you know, all day, this is absolutely terrible. Just come in and and vent if you need to vent, you know, the this is the dawn of fascism in America, blah blah blah, it's so terrible. And just walking around the city, then it was like this this oppressive atmosphere had just kind of descended. I mean, you could you could feel it, you could really feel it. And there were pro people protesting and and just all sorts of, and I'm like, this is this is the guy who presented The Apprentice, this is the guy who shaved Vince McMahon's head on on SmackDown. I mean, like, and you're telling me that this guy's Hitler. So I was yeah, I mean I I there I got a real dose actually of radical left-wing politics and and also a real sense that it was very much on the march. Uh, and that really, yeah, that did make me think much more explicitly. But um, I mean in 2018 I read a book called Bronze Age Mindset. It was just after it had been just after it had been released. It was recommended to me actually on Amazon, which is quite funny. The algorithm actually did some uh did some interesting work there because I I mean I've I'd been reading Nietzsche for some time. I went through a big Nietzsche phase when I was in my early 20s, you know, as I think maybe a lot of young men do, reading a lot of Nietzsche. Um and this book was recommended to me, and I bought it thinking it looked strange and and interesting, and and read it and found it quite revelatory in a in a number of different ways. Uh, and that's what led me to Twitter, really. First, as just a kind of lurker account lurking and uh laughing at Bronze Age Perverts tweets and other tweets of you know from people in the in the same kind of um galaxy as him. And then I mean I actually have trouble kind of reconstructing what happened, you know? It's it's it's a bit it's a bit weird. I I've suddenly ended up as a you know like minor e-celebrity with 320,000 followers on Twitter and I've been on Tucker Carlson and all this kind of other stuff. Um, but it it definitely wasn't planned. That's one thing I can say. It wasn't I didn't have a plan to do it, you know. It just kind of it just kind of happened that I ended up posting about politics and fitness and the intersection between health and fitness and politics and biology and politics. And I mean for a long time I I didn't really I avoided talking about things like the Reformation and and my research because I didn't want to give the game away who I was.

SPEAKER_02 26:27

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 26:28

Um so I haven't really talked that much until recently, until my identity was actually revealed by left-wing activists in the UK. I haven't really didn't really give much away about my kind of scholarly background, but now I'm now I'm free to do that, and so I do. I mean, I I posted something, I don't know if you saw it on Substack. I actually posted a um an academic article that I wrote and had published. Um it was actually published after I was was doxxed, funnily enough. But it was it was um uh an academic piece about a book of manuscript sermons that I discovered in America. So um when I was doing my PhD, I wrote about um a preacher in Dorset called Francis Frampton. And uh he was just a minor character, but anyway, I I managed to find in the Folga Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, his a book of his manuscript sermons. So it's amazing. It was his notebook where he was, I mean, so it wasn't polished or anything. He was writing out sermons, and you could see him correcting stuff, and and and uh there were sort of interesting on in the in the uh back of the book there was a list of communicants in the parish and stuff, and it was you know like work in progress stuff, but very, very, very interesting, and it was all of it was like a year's worth of sermons, so Easter Sunday and all this kind of stuff, Christmas and whatever. Um, so I I wrote an article about um the manuscript sermons, but in particular about his funeral sermons, because there were a couple of interesting little funeral sermons in there, and um, so I transcribed them and then I commented on them and and talked about them among other things, you know, the fact that actually Puritans didn't like funeral sermons very much at all, and so they kept them very, very brief, refused basically to pass judgment on the deceased, um uh didn't like any kind of ornamentation, eulogies, anything like that. Um uh so I I mean I've I've posted that quite fairly maybe in the last year on Substack, I think.

SPEAKER_00 28:38

But that's great. I'll have to go look that up. Yeah, for the listener, I think they'll be able to tell why I wanted to have you on, because a lot of our interest overlap and a lot of our experience overlaps with my experience in seminary in the late, it was all 2011 to 2019. I was in seminary twice. Uh obviously it was in evangelical seminary, but deeply compromised. And then with fitness and with my uh doctoral research on Puritan theology. Um, but you've recently come out with this book, The Last Men. Um how much of your book, like, is when you read this book, I did this because this is my book, Offensive Christianity, is my second book. And I'm always curious to see people's intellectual trajectory over time. I think that's one of the most uh kind of like you were doing with your your academic research, you know, places change over time. I'm interested in people over time, especially theologians' academics. You know, with your uh thesis, I think uh dissertation or thesis at Oxford, you know, do you find any did that inform or is that informing your viewpoints in the last minute?

SPEAKER_01 29:41

Uh I would probably say no. I don't know that there's a huge amount of of overlap uh there at all, really. I mean in broad terms, I think that the Reformation is probably the most important event in in modern history. Probably the most important event of the last thousand years uh for for all of its manifold effects that it's had on virtually every single facet of of modern life that you could could care to name. But um yeah, I I wouldn't say that there's a great deal of overlap there at all. Um I mean I do talk about I do talk about C.S. Lewis in the book. I talk about um his idea of men without chests, for example. Um uh and interestingly enough, actually, there was uh there was a kind of hatchet job review of the book in First Things. Really, really bad review of the book that I think was probably motivated by bad intentions. It didn't strike me as uh any any kind of attempt to um to engage with the arguments in good faith. And so I did actually I did actually end up writing a piece for American Greatness about it where I said like this book may not be explicitly Christian, but actually here are reasons why Christians should should take this book seriously and should should think uh very carefully about the relationship between virtue and biology. And and that is something that is in the book definitely, um, although I don't develop it too much, but I do talk about the C. S. Lewis uh men without chests, and you know, I mean he was talking metaphorically, right? I mean he was saying uh uh he was using a series of metaphors about castration, you know, we castrate the gelding and and bid it be fruitful or whatever it is. Uh he says, and he you know uses his metaphor, men without chests. Well, he was talking metaphorically, but I'm talking literally. I'm saying men today literally do not have chests, and it is because of biological changes that are taking place. And you know, C.S. Lewis is talking about courage, he's talking about masculine virtue, he's talking about being a man, and and my argument is like yeah, I mean, of course it's about virtue, but there is a biological substratum that makes it much harder to be a virtuous man if it's not there. So um uh there are definitely ways I think that this book can be approached or can be can be useful to a Christian audience, and I and I would and I would want it to. I would want it to. I mean I've written it for a broad kind of general audience. I mean, I'm I'm building on really I'm building on the Tucker Carlson documentary that I was in in 2022, The End of Men. So this is the last men, and that was called The End of Men. Uh, I was in that with uh RFK Jr. who, as we know, is now Secretary of Health and Human Services. Um uh and that was about testosterone decline and the social and political implications of civilizational testosterone decline, which is what's happening. Um uh so I mean I think it's a blind point actually for a lot of Christians and for a lot of um people who are suggesting, oh, well, what we need is you know, we need Christian, we need strong Christian men again. Well, like you can't I don't think you can ignore biology. You can talk about the importance of cultivating virtue and and proper pedagogy, and you need Christian leaders in the community who teach young men and good fathers and all this kind of stuff, but and that that's all good. And I I mean I gr I agree with that, but I think that actually you can't ignore you can't ignore what's happening at a biological level, or or you or you ignore it at your peril, and and you know you're you're actually um uh potentially missing a big part of the of the problem that you can actually do something about as well.

SPEAKER_00 33:56

Yes, exactly, and this is what I you know I get after is that the for the Christians that deny the importance of these realities, these biological realities, T levels, and ways to mitigate against endocrine disruptors, uh there's a deep uh unhelpful split between the material and immaterial, such that the material is denigrated, where they neglect their own bodies, which is highly ironic considering we worship a savior who's embodied now, right? He has redeemed flesh. And so uh I get after this in my work a lot. I want to make sure I understand in your book, kind of uh a big thing that comes up is uh Fukuyama and kind of the end of history thesis with liberalism being dominant, and then the material kind of chemical, biological food, all this kind of stuff. So which which is more upstream for you, or do they work in tandem? Uh which gave rise to the other, I guess. Is it liberalism gave rise to these biological issues, or is it more of a biological issue that has generated liberalism as a as a as a problem?

SPEAKER_01 35:06

It's worth actually, just before you we talk about that, you know, maybe uh talking a little bit about this split between the material and the immaterial.

SPEAKER_02 35:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:16

Uh or something like that. Because I mean, one of the things that was very striking actually in the review in First Things was the reviewer whose n whose name I forget made a point about um the fact that actually, oh, if you glorify the body, or if you say that, you know, like um uh testosterone is necessary for virtue, then you're misinterpreting uh sort of Christian history and the fact that actually you can be a saint with a with a body that is totally collapsing and and you know uh and that um you know self-mortification and all this kind of stuff has always been a played a big role in in church history. And uh I just thought like yeah, I mean you don't you don't need to deny any of that. You don't need to deny that women can be virtuous despite having far lower testosterone levels than men, that women can be extremely courageous. I mean, I'm I'm very lucky actually, I've come from a family. My mother and my my grandmother have uh incredibly courageous women. Uh I wouldn't deny that at all. Um uh it almost seems to me like I don't know whether it's willful ignorance or just like a desire whether it's a fear, I don't know what it is, but it's like um I could just tell that there was like a real block there, you know. It's like I j this the whoever it was read reviewed the book just did not want even to consider the argument on its merits. Um and I and I do think that that there are certain elements obviously of Christianity that make it much more more difficult to do, but you know, there are there are so many passages that you could talk about. Body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, you know. You you I mean yes, the the central symbol of Christianity is God dying on the cross. It is a a body that has been destroyed through torment and torture and and but it's also the transcendence of death.

SPEAKER_00 37:24

I mean it's uh it's an inc it's an incredible it's an incredible story actually of overcoming and and um uh and he's writ that's the thing, he's risen, like he he wasn't just this is what so uh pardon me, listener, but and I I I'm not getting away from orthodox biblical understanding of the significance of the death on of Jesus on the cross, the physical, literal death of Jesus on the cross. But we believe as Christians, he rose from the grave, and it wasn't just some symbol, it wasn't an apparition, he wasn't a ghost, like he physically rose from the grave by the power of God, and so the body is massively important. Of course, the there could be a massive overcorrection, and we could go uh to a place that the Bible wouldn't permit us to go, and God doesn't encourage us to go, where we worship the body alone, but but to to not even account for it, to act that we have some kind of Gnostic disembodied uh spirituality, it's very Buddhist in nature, it's it's very uh very strange amalgamation of spirituality, and our eternal destiny as embodied creatures is embodied in glory. Uh, as Christians, we confess the Apostles' Creed, which talks about the resurrection from the dead. We will be embodied. Again, this is not to overcook the importance of the body, but it it it it baffles me as well when I talk to uh to Christians about these things. Like your T levels will affect your ability to live out a virtuous life. Like, yeah, and there's so many men who struggle with prayer and cultivating virtue and good habits and saying uh killing their sin, all of these good things, and and they need to do those things, but they're inhibited by biology, right? They're inhibited uh and they're they're not helping themselves by being overweight or sedentary, and that frustrates me to a great deal.

SPEAKER_01 39:20

Yeah, I mean, I think another thing I said in the review was, you know, like uh a low a low-T society like ours is a s society that is much like less likely to produce um men like, for example, the Great Crusading Knights, the the winged hussars who who rode to the who rode to the relief of of Vienna in 1683. I mean, like, it it kind of makes uh it almost makes a mockery of Christian history and of the and of the forces that have helped sustain the faith. They're not the only forces that have sustained the faith, but they are significant ones, and they're ones that actually, I mean, do you want to disavow them? Do you want to say that they're that they're not important or that actually that things would have gone the way they've gone without them? So I yeah, I mean I I find it I find it uh I do find it strange. But okay, so to get back to the the Fukuyama and the biology, I mean my my argument really is that A, is that liberalism is a low testosterone system. That's one of one central plank of my argument, is that I kind of I take Francis Fukuyama's argument about the end of history in thymos, which is this Greek word that means spiritedness, and I say, actually, you know what, thymos is a very, very good proxy for testosterone. And so when Fukuyama says um and it's worth remembering, it's worth remembering actually, you know, like Francis Fukuyama's book is called The End of History and the Last Man. And it's the and the last man, the the the second half of the title that people forget. They remember the end of history bit, but they forget that actually Fukiyama is also offering in the final quarter of the book quite a profound, uh kind of really kind of soul-searching Nietzschean critique of what happens to man at the end of history under liberalism. He doesn't think that it's an unalloyed good, the triumph of liberalism. He actually thinks that it will leave men fundamentally dissatisfied in certain in certain ways. And one of those ways is uh certain forms of thymos, particularly megalothymia, which is the desire to be recognized as better than one's peers, to compete with one's peers and to be arranged in a hierarchy and to be above them, whatever, that can't be satisfied. And so I kind of I kind of turn Fukuyama's argument about thymos into an argument about testosterone and about the biological basis of male behavior and its and its kind of fate under liberalism. So that's one thing that I say is that, or one of the central planks is that actually, you know, liberalism itself is kind of a low testosterone system, and it's difficult for men to find satisfying outlets for their masculinity. And it's worth remembering that, you know, testosterone exists in feedback loops with behavior. So, you know, if you have high testosterone, you do certain things that reinforce having high testosterone, and it's uh like a virtuous um cycle. If you have low testosterone, um you end up doing things that reinforce having low testosterone, and you're going down, down, down, and down and down until until you're at the bottom of a pit. Um, you know, you lose, your testosterone goes down, you're less likely to compete, which means your testosterone, and it's like that. So um uh there is a kind of biological element to this end of history scenario that hasn't really been brought out. So that's what I try and do. But then there's all the all these other things as well that are going on, like for example, um the ubiquity of harmful chemicals that interfere with our hormonal systems, so they're called endocrine disruptors. Um and I mean they are they are literally everywhere. It's one of these strange kinks, actually, of modern industrial chemistry and and modern industry that um pretty much every chemical you can think of, every sort of um herbicide, pesticide, uh chemical you find in deodorants, personal care products, or not nonstick coatings, uh, all these uh food additives, whatever, they all have this kink where they actually, in the human body, they either directly mimic estrogen. The female hormone, or they stimulate the production of estrogen or processes that are estrogenic. So we're bathed basically in a toxic soup that is interfering with the natural ratio between testosterone to estrogen in the human body. And that in men, then that brings down testosterone levels and it, you know, makes you put on weight, it um reduces your libido, your fertility, your muscle mass, it affects your moods, etc. So um, and it also has bad effects on women as well. So too much estrogen is bad for women too. Um uh so there's this kind of um there's this kind of political problem that I framed, but then there are also these environmental problems, problems of um diet and lifestyle. So, you know, people are overweight and they eat processed food, and I mean being overweight reduces your testosterone, being inactive reduces your testosterone, etc. So it's kind of like a double whammy. I mean, I don't I don't think that these that liberalism necessarily created those problems, the problems of industry, because of course, you know, I mean, they're they're problems you see today in China and you would have seen in the Soviet Union too. I mean, we are talking about chemical structures and um uh and and things like that. So uh it's not necessarily that like liberalism creates microplastics, for example. That's actually something that someone else said in in quite a uh another really bad faith review of the book, where they were like, he seems to think that I seem to think that liberalism is responsible for microplastics, but what about what about China? And I'm like, I am not saying that liberalism is responsible for microplastics. I'm not I like the so in many in many ways the Soviet Union had a much worse environmental record than we do. I mean, you know, they did abysmal things in Central Asia, like if you look at the Aral Sea, for example, and how polluted that became and disappeared. Um, like it so I'm not I'm not saying that liberalism necessarily leads to um the production of harmful chemicals that drain us of our testosterone. That isn't my argument. I'm just saying that there has been a confluence of these different factors. So we've got this low testosterone system, uh, and then we've also got all this other stuff going on, which which reinforces that and makes it worse. And basically we're in a we're in a really bad pickle, you know. And um so the two things reinforce each other, I think. You know, it's like I mean, I I kind of I there's this glib line that I use sometimes where I say, if it turned out that actually all of these harmful chemicals increased men's testosterone and you know made men more muscular, more thrusting, more politically engaged, more confident, then governments would have done something about environment about these chemicals a long time ago because they they would actually Yeah, well it would have made men uh far far harder to govern. Um but actually because these because these chemicals tend to reinforce, how shall we say, um uh like conformist behavior and quiescent behavior, then actually they're not perhaps seen as as quite so much of a of a problem that they might be. So I mean it's like it's it's a complex situation. I there's a lot there's a lot going on, but yes, I broadly speaking, then I'm saying it's it's political, this kind of situation that put that puts certain limits on our behavior as men, and then you've also got all this biological stuff that's going on, environmental stuff that's going on that that reinforces it and makes it worse.

SPEAKER_00 47:51

That makes sense. Uh I don't have much time with you. I've got to talk about uh Christianity and Bibleism. Uh I've I've written on this a little bit in my work, and I'm looking forward to sending you a copy of my book. I just addressed Nietzsche on a couple of pages. Um But his critique of Christianity, um, and he's uh from what I understand, he's kind of um he writes a lot. And so there, you know, he sees Jesus as both kind of this revolutionary but also this uh founder uh and what Christianity has become, at least in his day, is kind of a slave morality, uh pacifistic this kind of thing. Um and I'm a s I as far as I know, vitalism is very deeply connected to kind of Nietzscheanism. Um would you agree with Nietzsche's assessment of Christianity kind of being a slave morality? Or how would you because I know you've written on Christianity and vitalism how Christianity is kind of irreconcilable. I just wanted to hear your thoughts on that a little bit more. I'm not saying that it can be necessarily reconciled. I don't, in the end, I don't agree with Nietzsche and his assessment, yeah, but I think there's things we can appreciate about his critiques of Christianity, which actually are very prescient in my estimation. So I just wanted to hear your thoughts on that.

SPEAKER_01 49:08

Yeah, I mean, so I did I did write a uh an essay about Christian vitalism, uh, and it's on my Substack actually. You should be able to find it on there. Uh, because I was there there were quite a lot of sort of simple-minded uh posts that I was seeing on Twitter about kind of about Christian vitalism and and you know how the future for the church should just be kind of you know returning to the days of Hernan Cortez and the conquistadors and the knights and and you know we could we could have this we could just have this muscular Christianity again that's that's expansionist and aggressive and and you know for for God and glory. Um uh and I was trying it isn't that I'm that I that I necessarily disagree with the notion that there are that there could be a Christian vitalism or that Christianity has vitalist elements in it, because you know, we were just talking about about the triumph over death and the physical the physical transcendence of death. I mean there isn't actually something there isn't actually really a concept that I can imagine that is more vitalistic actually than the notion of a complete triumph over death. Um so it's not that it's not that I think that there isn't potential within Christianity. What I think, and what I was trying to argue actually in the in the essay was that there's a problem with institutional Christianity, I think, that is exemplified, for example, by recent popes and their embrace basically of the great replacement, of demographic replacement in Europe. And we saw this very recently. July the 4th, where is the Pope? He's in Lampedusa blessing migrants um in a very very pointed rebuke of Donald Trump and of Donald Trump's policies. They've already they already clashed. Um uh before that, and there was a big bruha about about that. But you know, um so my argument was really that don't expect institutional Christianity to embrace um a kind of life-affirming um ideal, don't expect um institutional Christianity to go back to wanting to preserve traditional Chris Christendom as you as Europe, basically. Um uh, you know, like actually now you've got a Pope who is who is opening the gates for the barbarians into Europe. So it it was it was it definitely wasn't an argument about a lack of vitalist potential within Christianity per se. It was much more about institutional Christianity and and being being realistic about the possibility for an institutional muscular Christianity. Like I think in smaller sects and in smaller churches, then with a different kind of leadership, then I think that that's possible. But I don't think that the worldwide Anglican communion led by the Archbishop of Canterbury is suddenly gonna be, you know, um uh harking back to the great Christian heroes of of you know the Middle Ages or the 16th and 17th centuries. Like you're just that's just not gonna happen. That isn't gonna happen.

SPEAKER_00 52:59

So Yeah, well, even even in England with the the Defender of the Faith has recently come out and uh become all inclusive, you know, and and welcoming to all faiths, it's very shameful behavior. So I totally appreciate the cynicism on uh the institutional stuff. Am I right though when I'm connecting, you know, because some people have called my book and uh they've could they've written reviews saying I'm promoting a muscular Christianity as if it's a problem, right? Yes. Uh uh, but but vitalism is connected to Nietzsche in that it's kind of this energy, this dumas, this thymotic power, uh world-conquering spirit. Um that's fair to say, right?

SPEAKER_01 53:43

Well, I mean, what I would say is vitalism has a much deeper history than Nietzsche. So, I mean, uh there is I mean, vitalism actually in many respects was the default position of the sciences and philosophy for you know up until up until the modern age, really, when it was replaced with the kind of mechanism. I mean, really, when you if you're talking about vitalism in a kind of minimal sense, what you're talking about is the notion that there is something irreducible to life, that life is something different, that there is a force or a life has a nature that is different from, let's say, like mere matter. Um, and then of course you have the kind of mechanistic approach, which is well, you know, we're all we're all cogs basically in a in a machine, and you know, we don't there isn't anything different between you or I and a and a rock at some kind of base physical level, you know, at the level of atoms or or um quantum particles or whatever. Um uh so I mean vitalism definitely has a longer history than Nietzsche, but yeah, I mean Nietzsche is is the is the figure who is associated with with vitalism today, and obviously his philosophy, certainly his later philosophy, takes on a much more explicitly anti-Christian um uh anti-Christian tinge or an anti-Christian theme. I mean his last published work was The Antichrist, right? Right, um, where he kind of announces himself as a sort of antichrist figure and is is teetering on the brink of madness as possibly even kind of plunged into it. Um I mean I think there are aspects of his critique of Christianity that that are very perceptive, and I mean it's worth remembering, you know, his father was a Lutheran pastor. I mean he he he was you know it's not he wasn't an outsider, and I think he I mean I was reading a biography of Nietzsche fairly recently. I mean, as he he was at one point, he intended to follow his father into the ministry. I mean uh so it's it's definitely kind of like an insider's view. I mean, I I mean we can we can uh pick holes in in his kind of account of the emergence of let's say Christian morality as a slave revolt in um uh in uh an act like an actual event that took place in history and an inversion of values. And I mean there are elements of it that you can see that obviously in many respects Christianity is fundamentally opposed to the prevailing morality of Rome. That's that I think that's pretty indisputable. And um uh and in many and you know, in many respects, Christianity triumphed over Roman traditional religion, not necessarily through force of arms, but through a kind of inner maybe let maybe let's not use subversion as the word, but you know what I mean. Like it was it was a values, kind of like a values-based triumph. It wasn't a military conquest or anything like that, you know, it was it was something else. Um and I mean I think some of the psychological things that he talks about are interesting. I think that his the way that he talks about the emergence of the guilty conscience is very interesting. So um uh where he talks about the kind of the what's he talking about? I mean he talks about like the sense of cosmic debt, basically, that that you have towards the creator, that that kind of emerges out of the sense of original sin and it kind of turns in on itself and it it kind of um creates this kind of really unpleasant sort of uh inner complex. I wrote uh I wrote an essay for American Mind a couple of years ago about that guy Aaron Bushnell, who set himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy, and I used Nietzsche's account of the emergence of the guilty conscience in genealogy of morality to describe basically like uh Aaron Bushnell's psychological journey from being a basically earnest, patriotic Christian, which is what he was when he first joined the the US military, to becoming a self-hating leftist who thought that the only way that he could atone for the original sin of being born white and privileged was to set himself on fire to raise awareness of the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza. Um it's it's a it's it's one of I think it's one of my most interesting essays because it's very clearly Nietzsche, I think, understood at some level what a guilty conscience looks like and where it comes from and what it does to a person and how it can force them into an extreme position where they actually think I'm not worthy enough to live. I have to expiate my sin by by killing myself, by setting myself on fire, which is which is what Aaron Bushnell did. But the I mean the the really horrible element of that whole story is the fact that actually after Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire, all of these people, um, you know, sort of like left-wing people of colour, were saying actually that was an act of privilege that he did. It was it was uh it was uh an act of privilege for him to set himself on fire because the people of Gaza don't have the privilege of committing suicide, they only have the privilege of being bombed to death by the Israelis. Um it was really it was like a stunning, stunning bit of cruelty. It's like like this guy's just said it just killed himself because he feels so guilty. And you're saying actually that was an act of pri I mean like if Nietzsche had been alive to see that, he would have, you know, I mean he would have chuckled or something. I mean, he really would have. But uh I mean that I I definitely think there are aspects of Nietzsche's critique that are very, very penetrating and very interesting. Um uh but whether or not it's uh I don't so I don't it's obviously not a full account of Christianity. It's obviously I don't think it's necessarily a plausible account of the historical emergence of Christianity, but I do think that he was a very penetrating psychologist, and certainly things like the kind of uh the guilty conscience that he talks about, I think is is very good. And I also think that he's very good about um the intellectual um the kind of um the movements, the the relationship between Christianity and things like liberalism and socialism. So the fact that socialism and and uh in particular and communism, you know, that they are kind of afterbirths of Christianity in a sense. They are kind of secularized versions of Christianity, they have the same basically the same kind of there's the same kind of moral system, but stripped of the kind of uh metaphysical architecture or the kind of metaphysical surroundings.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:10

Yeah, it's an anti-reality Christianity, and a lot of these movements are um yeah, it's so sad when like the left uh does this to people. I mean, that's why people call it just a giant suicide cult. There's no theory of atonement, there's no forgiveness, there's no mercy, there's no way to triumph. Um, it's just death all the way down, and it's really sad. Is it growing up, you know, you're an Englishman, uh conservative leaning. Is is Christianity something you you would call yourself a Christian or at this point? Are you going to church or anything like that? What is what does kind of that look like for you?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:44

Yeah, I mean, I I I'm I mean I'm I'm a baptized Church of England for for whatever good that that that um that does me. I mean I I grew up in a I grew up going to church. Um I did go to Sunday school for a period as a as a child, but I mean I I went to a village Church of England school. We re we were regularly in the church which was next door to the to the school, you know. So I mean I would say that my I mean this is the it's like the the T. S. Eliot thing, the idea of a Christian society. Like I d I don't think society Western society isn't going to stop being Christian in a in a sense until there is a an alternative positive ideal. So we're kind of we're kind of Christians in a negative sense, in the sense that actually nothing else has come along yet. So I mean culturally, like, yeah, I I very definitely am a Christian. I I think anybody who tries to argue, anybody who's who is you know a Westerner who tries to argue that they're not in some fundamental sense a Christian, uh they end up in the realms of absurdity. And that's exactly what happens with these new atheist types, with Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins especially, you know, where they sort of try to claim that they're that they're sort of like um secular morality of just be a just be a good person uh is is you know just like is is just is just what what you would believe if you were a rational person, rather than actually just being Christianity stripped of its metaphysical accoutrements. You know, it's like like look at look at the history of the world. Universal morality, universalism is not the norm. Like you believe in the universal dignity of humanity and of individuals, the un you know, the inherent moral worth of individuals for a reason. And that is because you are the product of 2,000 years of of Christian history, like and you know, an even longer history of of of monotheism and whatever. So it's like um I mean I very definitely obviously a cultural Christian. I mean, at times I've tried very hard, actively tried to be Christian, and certainly when I was when I was doing the D-fill, I was going to chapel a lot in the college and going to because I really I mean I really I wanted to I'm writing about and writing and studying about Christianity, you know, I need to see it from the inside. I need to um uh because I mean one of the one of the chapters of the of the book is about of the thesis is about church music and uh which I didn't think I would be writing about, but actually it was really, really fascinating. Church music in the Reformation. And you know, I mean it does make a difference to be in a medieval building listening to an organ. Like and and and you know, you are per you are performing the liturgy from the Book of Common Prayer that Thomas Cranmer wrote, right? So um I was I was tapped into it and I was definitely recep I was definitely receptive. I mean my my my feeling is that I I think I'm gonna need to be knocked on my ass by God, basically, is is how I kind of feel. I like I feel something's gonna have to happen that will that will allow me to bridge the gap because there is still a gap and I I can't get across it myself. So but I mean I'm I'm definitely I'm definitely sympathetic. I mean I you know I've studied I grew up in a Christian environment, like I say, and um I've studied Christianity, I'm very I'm very sympath, I am very sympathetic, and to to see the Catholic Church in the state that it's in, the Pope, I mean it does does make me it does actually does and the Church of England it does make me angry, genuinely.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:42

Yeah. Well, I I will hope that you don't have to uh get beat, you know, to come to Christ. Uh but you know, if if such cases are necessary, then uh then I'll I can also pray for that as well. You know, but I would uh yeah, I'll send you a copy of my book. I guess last question though you're pressed for time. Is uh you know, if if somebody takes your book, The Last Uh Man, and uh, you know, we've diagnosed the problem, you know, what is what is the future? What is what is it we're trying to push men towards? Is it just they gotta go get TRT and get get up to 800 at least on their T levels and we'll save civilization? What are we looking at here as kind of like the the um the positive thesis, the way forward for men today?

SPEAKER_01 1:06:27

Well, so I mean like uh in line with with what I do on Twitter and in in my uh other writing, then part of the prescription is for men to take control of their own lives, to clean up their diets, to minimize their exposure to harmful chemicals, to exercise. Um so there is definitely an individual prescription. It would be good for more men, you know, to to look after their health. And there is this kind of there is definitely a burgeoning movement, I think. I think you know a lot of a lot of men are kind of rebelling against um uh the the way they're encouraged to live and and the way that they do live. So that's good. But then there's also I think the necessity for a political movement, um uh because so many of the problems that afflict us like harmful chemicals in the environment, individuals can't do anything about that. Like you can't do anything about DuPont um uh you know uh releasing PFAS chemicals into rivers and and bodies of and bodies of water. Like you can't like you you need regulations, you need a political movement like Make America Healthy Again, to change the way that chemicals are licensed, to change the way that that um uh food additives are licensed, to change uh the way that kids eat at school and the way that they're educated to incentivize exercise and healthy living and all this kind of stuff. Um but then actually, you know, the the the book ends with with a a series of questions because uh like I said earlier, you know, uh my thesis is that actually there is something fundamentally wrong, or there's something fundamentally unsatisfying about liberal democracy. And um uh which is what Fukuyama says and what what Nietzsche is saying too. So, you know, we could clean up the environment and we can we could get all the harmful chemicals out of the environment, we could make make it so that you know kids are all exercising at school and everybody's healthy and happy and we're all eating red meat and eggs and raw drinking raw milk. Um but there will still be this problem about the political system itself and whether that's actually a satisfying system to live in. Um and I mean I I don't just I I mean that for men, but also I mean I think it just in general. Is it is this really how we want to live for the rest of history? So um I think maybe, you know, like what would the future look like? Well, okay, we've solved we've solved the biological problems, you know, we've we've fixed the and then we're gonna confront this bigger problem about the political system and whether we want to whether we want to live a different way, whether we want to live a better kind of existence that actually allows us to lift our eyes up from the ground in front of us and maybe look up at the stars and and the sky and and wonder and ask big questions and and do great things.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:30

Alright. Well, I look forward to this future. I'll still look at the stars here in Colorado when I go uh go into the mountains. But you know, for for people who want to pick up a copy of your book, um where can they find it?

SPEAKER_01 1:09:42

So you can get it on Amazon. It's in hardcover, Kindle, and audiobook format. So just go to Amazon. The Last Men, Liberalism, and the Death of Masculinity.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:51

Excellent. Did you read the audiobook yourself? I no, I didn't, unfortunately.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:56

I I should I should get them to do a version where I do it because with my previous book, The Ex Benedict option, then yeah, I did. And it took such a long time to do it.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:04

Yeah, it's hard work. Well, I'll drive people there. And then your Twitter handle for people that want to follow you on Twitter. What is that?

SPEAKER_01 1:10:10

Uh, is baby babygravy9.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:13

Baby Gravy9. I'll put a link to that in the show notes, listener. Thank you so much for joining us today, and we'll see you next time. Thanks, Charles. Well, that'll do it for that episode. A huge thanks to Charles Cornestdale for coming on. Go pick up the last men on Amazon and hardcover Kindle or Audiobook. Follow him on X at BabyGravy9. Thank you for listening to today's episode. For those who uh either tuned in late or missed the front of the episode, go check out commonplace.study for AI-powered reformed and puritan research, real citations, real sources that you can find over at commonplace.study. Register for burntheps at boulderwell.org slash burntheps to hear from Dr. Stephen Wolfe and Dr. Joe. Rig me, and don't forget to pick up a copy of my book, Offensive Christianity, at offensive Christianitybook.com. Go to a second one to hand out to a guy in your life who needs to read it would find it encouraging. And if this episode helped you, sharpened you, challenge you, share it with a friend, leave it a rating, and subscribe. Smash that subscribe button on YouTube so you never miss out on episodes. Until next time, we'll see you next week.