>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: A catholic priest and a Mormon bishop see a boy riding a bike. The priest says, I must confess, I have a desire to screw that boy. The Mormon bishop asks, out of what? Welcome to the Cross examiner podcast, the Internet’s courtroom in the case of rationality versus religion. Here, our host uses his experience as both an attorney and an atheist to put religion on trial. We solemnly swear that it is the most informative, educational, and entertaining jury duty.

>> Speaker B: You will ever do. And now it’s time for the cross examiner.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Welcome, welcome, welcome to the Cross examiner podcast. I am your host, the cross Examiner. I am an attorney, I am an atheist, and I am alarmed. I’m alarmed by the rise of christian nationalism in the United States. But more importantly, I’m alarmed by the massive amount of misinformation that powers that rise. Today, we have a special treat, in my opinion. I, was asked by Ladder Daily Digest to do an interview. Ladder Daily Digest is a channel that focuses on content creation within the Mormon blogosphere. Usually. I did an interview with doctor John Delin, you may have seen, he is an ex Mormon who hosts the Mormon Stories podcast and Ladder daily Digest reached out to me to ask, if I would do an interview with them to talk about my channel and a bit about me. I was thrilled to say yes. They produce very interesting content. I’m going to put a link in the description below. I encourage you to visit their channel and give them a like and a subscribe. And without further ado, I’m just going to cut straight to the interview. Thanks a lot for watching.

>> Speaker C: Welcome, everyone, to Ladder Daily Digest. We honor creators, and today we have a special creator. He’s recently been on John Delin’s Mormon stories. He, they did a, co branding, interview where they played it on each other’s, channel. And welcome to the show. Graham Martin.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Hello. Nice to be here.

>> Speaker B: Welcome, Graham. So your show is the cross examiner. Do you want to explain how you came up with that title and background to that?

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Sure. So the very short version is, I am, an attorney and I am an atheist. And the name is a play on words. I took it from the concept in the legal concept of cross examining a witness, sort of getting them on the stand and sort of questioning what they’ve said before, and of course, the idea of examining the cross as far as examining religious claims. So it’s a, it’s a bit of a double entendre.

>> Speaker C: Yeah.

>> Speaker B: I think there’s a faithful podcast that’s got a similar name or is using that similar concept I’m sure. But, yeah, I think it’s gammon, I think.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Oh, sure. Yeah, I’ve seen that. I was struggling to come up with a name. In fact, I knew I wanted to do a podcast for a while, but I didn’t want to do it until I had sort of a hook or a brand or a name or something. And so I actually went online to a group, and I said, hey, I’m thinking about doing this podcast. Here’s my background. Here’s the theme. The very first response, somebody said, is the cross examiner. I’m like, all right, winner, winner, chicken dinner. I’m going to take that.

>> Speaker C: That’s right. It’s like, how did you not think of that?

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Right?

>> Speaker C: Like, I laid it all out, and it took somebody else’s brain to put all the pieces together. Yeah, that’s crowdsourcing, right?

>> Speaker B: Weird alma, Graham, you may not know, so weird Alma. He’s done, kind of weird al parodies, okay. Around Mormonism. And when, he was asked about coming up with the name, he had thought, because he had thought of weird al. And then, so Elma’s a character in the book of Mormon, but he just didn’t think of the name. So he’s trying to think, you know, what are some book of mormon names or something like really very mormon names that I can put weird in front of that. Yeah. And Alma, it’s not just the character, but it’s a really big character. There are books named after Alma. So it’s just like, you know, it was just amazing. He was just like, how, just how did I not think of that? Of course, people have good suggestions. Yeah. my nom de plume is from a suggestion, from a comment, when I first came out podcast. And so, yeah, I get it. I get it. So, so you wanted to. This is interesting to me because some people, when they feel like starting up podcast, they just buy a microphone, like, whatever cheap, like, computer headset, you know, office thing that they get at Walmart for like $15, and then just set it up and start going. And then I feel like there’s people and I can relate to this, to wanting to start, right. You know, and have kind of your ducks in a row a little bit. And that’s kind of partly why I drug this podcast along. Or, you know, the paralysis from an, for a while was like wanting to have this stuff. So how did you, how did you navigate that? How did you feel like, I have enough, I can start now. Or did you, did you battle that feeling? Of like, I can’t start yet because I need a, b, c, d, e, f, you know, all the way to z. did you, I don’t know, maybe that maybe it was easy for you and you knew when to start.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: No, no, not at all. I definitely, suffered from analysis paralysis. I, you know, I’m an attorney by trade. I also, practiced in the, software industry from, managing software developers as well. So I’ve got this sort of technical, procedural, logical background. And so I definitely was in the camp of, well, I need, I need a title, I need a theme, I need some cover art, I need a theme song. I need to list a whole bunch of topics that I want to do on a show. I need to come up with a format, all of those sorts of things. And I struggled with that, and I knew I was struggling with it because everything I’d done, when I went out and looked at, advice givers, influencers that talk about starting a podcast, the advice was the exact opposite. Go grab something, get on, start creating, and you’ll learn as you’re, as you go. But I just have this thing within me. I don’t want to put out junk, and then possibly grow tired of it or get discouraged, because I’m not putting out quality. So I think I found a balance between the two points. Like, I started earlier than I was comfortable with, but the process of actually making that first episode was very rewarding and the product I was very proud of. So I think that it was a good point for me. I agree with the advice of just getting out there and creating is a good way of doing it, but you have to do it when you think you’re going to produce something that you can be at least satisfied with.

>> Speaker B: And I being able to put something out on the regular as well, because that was my fear, was that I’ll go ahead and I’ll start. I have no problem starting projects. I am a pro at starting all kinds of chaos, but the follow through I’m not so good at. And I feel like that’s kind of why I wanted to have more built up and, yeah, kind of a pattern where you’ve got kind of the scaffolding so that it is easier to keep it going.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: So, yeah, I agree. I think it reminds me of Douglas Adams famous quote, I love deadlines, I love the sound they make as they whoosh by. So you can definitely fall into that trap. All the advice says, hey, have a production schedule, right? Just say on this day, I’m going to do this part of the show and this, you know, the R and D or whatever you want to do and have, have things lined up. I don’t have that, and I fell prey to that because, I started a few months over a year ago, and then we entered the time where my oldest son, who was a senior in high school, was college shopping, and I have a younger son who’s on the autism spectrum, and he was transferring to high school. We had a lot of life changes going on. and that caused me to have a dip in output, and I was like, oh, here we go again. Same, exact same example as you. I started something, I’m really happy with it, but I’m not producing. And so recently, I sort of went into season two of my podcast with a, a production schedule in mind, and that has really helped. So I recommend that to anybody is, start when you’re a little bit uncomfortable, but have a schedule, a goal schedule, and stick to it. And especially if you’re like me. I was younger in my life when I was diagnosed with sort of medium to mild depression, which manifests itself as, putting things off, you know, being the procrastinator that can, I knew that was a problem, which is one of the reasons I didn’t jump in with both feet with the, as you said, the walmart mic. I knew I needed a little bit of structure to help me, and that, and that has proven to be true. The production schedule is really helpful.

>> Speaker C: That’s cool. Oh, sorry, Maven. so, ah, I guess I want you to tell a little bit of background. We’ll point people to, the show that you did with John Delin on your channel. And that explains a lot about your, mirrored, m, sort of path that John Delin experienced. But, maybe you can go a little bit more about where you’re from and, your college and how you chose to become a lawyer. Just so we can get an idea of how did you come from a religious background.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Sure, sure. So, how much time you got? Because I can talk about myself all day long.

>> Speaker B: We, got time. You got the stage.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: I was born in charleston, south Carolina, in the seventies. 19, 70, to be example, early. My, father was an officer in the navy, a navigator on nuclear subs, which is why they were in charleston, south Carolina. There’s a big navy base there. My mother was a housewife slash retail, clerk and librarian. As I was growing up, she had a couple of different jobs. I was, not in a religious family, the way that most americans would think of it. I think my parents, were mildly religious. My mother took us to church occasionally. I think she felt that was the right thing to do. But we didn’t have a bible in the house that I’m aware of. We didn’t, do any sort of bible studies. I didn’t go to Sunday school. The closest I came was, in charleston, south carolina. South carolina. In the seventies, the education, public education, was like 49th in the nation, right above mississippi or something. So they found a school called Porter Gowd, school, in Charleston that you could get scholarships to if you tested into it. And I think they had something to do with military members as well. So they got us into that school. I have a brother, and they got both of us into that school. And that school was an episcopal school. But the only manifestation of religion I experienced at the school was once a week you went and you did chapel. So that is the extent of my religious upbringing, is, going to church a few times, and then the weekly chapel for the years I was at Portergaud. and that led me to a point where I think if you asked me, do you believe that there is a God? I probably would have said yes up until my early teens. But starting in my early teens, I think I would have changed to, I don’t know, I’m not convinced. and that’s sort of the early childhood. I ended up moving to the Washington, DC area after my father retired and took a job, as many ex officers in the military do, as a contractor in the DC area. And I was very fortunate to go to a public high school in the Bethesda area. We lived in a little place called Gleneco, Maryland, and I went to Walt Whitman High School. And, the reason I was fortunate to go to that school is it had a very diverse student body. It was a large school. And you had sons of diplomats, sons and daughters of diplomats attending from all over the world, and you had people that were blue collar workers, attending. So I had a very, very diverse experience there. And I’m very thankful about that, because I think if you look at the human experience, people who grow up in a diverse environment tend to be, a little more understanding of different lived experiences and things like that. And I definitely experienced that. I was, for example, I played volleyball, through high school, and college was a big part of my life. Half of my team was from Brazil, right? So I was to brazilian culture and portuguese language and all of that sort of stuff, and, I’m very fortunate about that. So I think that also influenced me in the way that I’m not locked into one worldview. I experienced different people’s lives through friendship and stories. And the faculty at the school was very good at sort of teaching different experiences, drawing upon the student body to sort of come up with, with lessons. So that’s sort of the going to.

>> Speaker C: A school named after a famous poet. Did that make, more students think about poetry as a career?

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: I don’t think so. I think the, the only time that the, the school, name came into play was when the Westboro Baptist church, you may remember them, the ultra conservative, I don’t want to say their tagline, but you may be familiar with it, God hates. And then a derogatory, ah word for ah, a gay person, a hate group. Basically, they are hate groups. After I graduated, at some point, they came and picketed the school because it was named after Walt Whitman, who had homosexuality, ah, in his background. And so that’s the only time I can remember any sort of intersection with the name of the school and any sort of lesson I learned. Excuse me. after that, I went to college and got a m degree, a, bachelor’s degree in political science, with the.

>> Speaker C: Idea, where’d you go to college?

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: I started at University of Maryland, and that’s when the, depression, hit in at that diagnosis, because I did not do well. I’m going to need to take a drink here.

>> Speaker C: Sure.

>> Speaker B: Yeah.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Excuse me. So, tarpaulins. Yeah. I didn’t do well that first semester, not because I was drinking beer and partying, but because I was learning how to play bridge and chess and having philosophical discussions all night, and then stopped attending classes out of depression. So I realized that at that point, I had sort of coasted through high school, and it didn’t, develop a lot of good sort of study skills and life skills. So my parents and I decided, okay, let’s go to my local community college. Let’s not waste money on this and do what a lot of kids are doing now today, which is save money, go to a community college, and then go back to a, four year institution. And when I went back to the four year institution, I went to a place called, back then it’s called Towson State. Now it’s called Towson University. It’s in Maryland. It’s part of the University of Maryland system, but it’s a much smaller environment. University of Maryland, you know, 50, 60,000 people. Towson, you know, 2010, somewhere in that range. And I really blossomed there. Finished my degree in political science. And when I graduated, I was not sure I actually wanted to be an attorney. In fact, my father had asked me, hey, do you sure you want to get into a career where on a daily basis you might be faced with ethical dilemmas and gray lines and that. Is that what you’re looking for? So I went back, I took a few days off, drove down to Charleston, to the beaches that I used to visit when I was a kid, and just sat there and thought about what I wanted to do with my life. And that’s when I decided, I think I’ll avoid law school. And I got into what I really also enjoy, which is teaching people. But I didn’t have a teaching degree. I did have a lot of self taught it background. I grew up using the Commodore 64 computer and I would program my own games and things like that. So I applied for a job, at a company called softmed that was looking for consultants to help install and train users on their medical records software. And I got that job, and that was where I met my first Mormon population. I met several people there who were, of the Mormon faith. And I started learning about them and found them all to be very nice and friendly and open. And I started getting the sense that once you have one Mormon, work, for a company, you start having more Mormons work for a company. So I guess that’s a common experience based on your reaction.

>> Speaker B: Yep. Yeah, we try to help each other. Yeah, it’s, it’s, you know, like a typical.

>> Speaker C: Yeah, there’s like employment. Somebody’s an employment special in each congregation, employment specialist.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: And so, and we’re, we were very close to the big, there’s a big temple on the beltway around Washington, DC. so there was a population there. So that was my first brush with mormonism. and I did that, up until y two k. This is something we shared with Doctor Delin. He worked on y two k conversions. I worked eventually on managing a team that handled the conversion of all of our clients, 2000 plus clients hospitals, converting, to y two k client software for people who don’t know about that time.

>> Speaker B: I remember that time, and I was still pretty young. I think I was either like upper end, end of middle school or I might have started high school. But I remember being genuinely concerned that the year would click over and just everything would shut down. That was, I think, the first kind of catastrophizing, that I did as a kid was around that.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Well, the concerns were not unfounded. It’s very common experience to have people say, hey, this thing’s going to happen unless we take preventative measures. Then you take the preventative measures and nothing happens. And the public at large is like, see, there was nothing to worry about. But wait, chicken little. Right, right. Kind of. Kind of the chicken little accusation. You see that with, swine flu, the first big, swine flu outbreak we had, I forget the year, but it was in my time where there was, eight range.

>> Speaker B: I served a mission and we, I think, wasn’t a University of Maryland. It was one of the first cases because I served my mission, covered that area. And, as missionaries and more, I’m sure, you know, like, we’re all about the handshakes all the time. And so they implemented this, you know, don’t shake hands with anybody to all of the missionaries. And it was just. That was a huge cultural shift to try to get out of your head, the audit that, you know, the just, instinct to reach out your hand to greet people that way. And so, yeah, yeah, that was. That’s the timeframe that I’m remembering.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Then that’s. That fits with me as well. And it was my first example of this, like, in the medical world, outside the it world, where everybody said, hey, this thing’s coming. This is a variant we haven’t seen. It’s bad. And the nation mobilized. You didn’t see the radical reaction you did in, in the recent pandemic. You. You saw everybody sort of getting behind the effort to come up with a vaccine, and it turned out to be a nothing burger because they were so effective at communication. I mean, even you, as a mission heard, hey, there’s this thing, social distance. It’s early version of social distance. Don’t shake hands. and it worked. It worked very well. And then afterwards, the, bomb thrower sitting on the sidelines said, see, there’s nothing to worry about. So that happens again and again. And y two k was a bit of that. I can tell you, based on what we were doing, if we hadn’t fixed our software, there could have been medical mistakes. You have ages, calculated on birthdays. That’s the biggest one. That was a real problem. But, yeah, flight, software, navigation software, all of that could have had real problems. I don’t think you would have seen an apocalypse or nuclear bombs going off, but it definitely could have affected the economy very badly. and so that was a period where the country got together. And from a conservative standpoint, I’m not a conservative, but you can acknowledge where the market actually is effective. The market was effective. Companies didn’t want to lose business, and so they, on their own, fix this problem. I thought you were going to.

>> Speaker C: Say that, God intervened and helped us all out.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: No, I’m talking conservativism of, hey, we don’t need the government to come in and regulate this. and it’s an example of the type of things where it can be beneficial. I think that we can get into it later if we get into politics, but I think that fails in a lot of different types of market situations. we have to acknowledge each other’s sides. And I do acknowledge to my conservative friends, wow, that’s a great example of the market handling the problem, because it would have been so obvious and immediate if your company failed. If there’s failures that you can hide or that stretch on forever because your product causes cancer, for example, smoking. the market fails utterly in those circumstances, and we need regulation. But I do like to look for places to acknowledge that the other side is not completely wrong and I’m not completely right. And this is a great example. Y two k was mostly managed by the market. So, that’s that. So after that, I, left the medical records software company. I started my own web company with two of my best friends. this was during the y two k Internet boom, post y two k Internet boom. And we decided we didn’t want to be, it was a gold rush, right? And we didn’t want to be panning for gold. We just wanted to sell the pickaxes and the pans and the jeans to all the prospectors. So we created a company that made websites and did all of that sort of stuff. And this is when, Bush v Corps happened. So the Bush election happens, and I look around and I realize, of all my friends, I’m the only one downloading and reading the entire supreme court opinion in Bush v. Gore. And it gets me, it gives me two thoughts. One, I obviously still have an interest in the law. Two, nobody else is doing this, not even the press, like you’re hearing filtered news. and that was very frustrating. And then three, I guess there’s a third. Point is, I didn’t agree with the majority opinion. And so that was a real strong signal to me that I needed to go back to law school. So by 2004, we had sold our company. I was fortunate enough to be in a position to go back to law school full time. And so I ended up applying to several law schools and ended up going to University of Maryland in my home state and focused, my studies, on administrative law, which is the most boring form of law to a lot of people. But the most important, it’s the thing that affects most people’s lives. And administrative law is anytime an executive agency, the FDA, the army, the patent office does something, they have to do it legally. And you have a bunch of rights as a citizen to object to what they’re doing. And the way they make rules have to go through a certain procedure. There’s a lot of sort of base stuff there, and they touch your life much more than the police do, criminal law does, or, anything else. Yeah. I mean, you just look at two.

>> Speaker C: Days, unless you’re a criminal, like maven.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Right.

>> Speaker C: And the police affect her a lot.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Yeah. But there’s also administrative law with how police agencies are run. So, you know, you’ve got this tool, dual layer thing there. So just. Just yesterday, I think it was that the supreme Court came down and overturned the Texas case where the judge, enjoined the FDA from granting permission to market the abortion pill. that’s administrative law through and through.

>> Speaker C: That’s actually the, cause that when she got arrested in front of the supreme court. Yeah, she was.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Okay, well, I need to interview you, because I’m.

>> Speaker C: There you go.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Next episode is about the judge who originally decided that case in Amarillo, Texas. His background, his motivations, and how, again, we’ve got a situation where sort of radical religious people are trying to, do anything they can to turn this into a christian nation. And this guy is sort of the mascot for that effort. so I’m doing. I’m doing my research. Now, the reason I actually came up with the story is not because of the FDA case. It was because of a case a week ago or a week and a half to University of Texas, not law. I think they’re undergrad professors filed suit against, the Biden administration for their promulgation of some new rules regarding the interpretation of title IX. And they filed suit not in Austin, Texas, where their school is, but eight and a half hours away in Amarillo, where this judge exists. And they are suing for the right to discriminate against female students who miss, classes or tests. This, is part of what they’re saying because they went and got an abortion. Basically saying, I want to be able to flunk you if you miss my exam because you went and got an abortion and they also don’t want to hire any teaching assistants who are female who got an abortion. And they chose this judge’s, court, because that district, if you’re suing the federal government, you can sue in any federal court. that district is a one judge district. So they knew which judge they’re going to get. So all these cases are filed in.

>> Speaker B: That district and that the supreme court.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Yeah, exactly. He’s had his cases overturned many times. Not at the circuit level. That circuit’s fairly, in the bag for christianity and conservatism, but the supreme Court itself, overturns it. And the opinion yesterday by the court was unanimous, which was shocking these days.

>> Speaker B: So I was relieved.

>> Speaker C: Yeah, Maven.

>> Speaker B: Oh, sorry, go ahead, Gene.

>> Speaker C: Maven would be happy to go on your show. Her appearance fee is in the John Stamos level.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: I’ll have to check. I’ll have to check the budget. Budget very, very low, let’s put it that way. So, yeah, that’s what I focused on in law school, is administrative law. But my Capstone project, the final sort of clinic and project that you run, was focused on the, working for a professor there that had worked on tobacco regulations, specifically the master settlement agreement that was entered into between the many states and the tobacco companies. And I learned a lot from her and doing work there. And that’s sort of the first time. And I’m sit. As I’m sitting here, I’m realizing that’s the first time I’m deep in. I’m elbow deep into an issue and realizing, oh, this wasn’t a mistake. This wasn’t one or two rogue people. This was massive numbers of people in giant companies intentionally lying to the public not only about the health benefits of their product, but about the fact that they are marketing to children. That’s the thing that really got me is there are memos that. That came out during this, the lawsuits that the, attorneys general filed against the tobacco companies back in the day. The internal memos that describe kids as, quote, replacement smokers. We need replacement customers because our customers keep dying on us. So.

>> Speaker B: Is that Marlboro or. No, all of them. Yeah. No, but I. Joe the camel.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> Speaker B: was the, like, the creation of that was to be more marketable to kids, and that they often would deliberately tried to have, you know, set up stands or marketing, I think, near schools.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: That’s, if I’m calling, they would definitely do it.

>> Speaker C: There was a cowboy. That was Marlboro, and Joe the camel was camel cigarette. yeah, just in case we offend any of the brand conscious.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Yeah. And, yeah, they would, they would manufacture, candy cigarettes we all used back in the seventies and eighties. They used to have candy that you would get. Yeah, absolutely. They’re kind of chalky.

>> Speaker B: I bought some as a kid, and then I remember feeling so, so guilty. I was on a campout, so I wasn’t around my parents, and I thought it was cool and kind of funny because they weren’t really, but you could kind of pretend. But even I was, like, a super Mormon. And then I felt super guilty after.

>> Speaker C: Because we’re taught what maven even the appearance of is a sin.

>> Speaker B: Yep.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Wow. I have.

>> Speaker B: I genuinely felt that I had, I had done wrong to buy this, this candy, cigarettes. I think it was gum.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Yeah. It wasn’t. It wasn’t the corporation that knew they were killing children by getting them addicted to nicotine. That had done wrong and marketing to kids. It was you. You had done wrong for succumbing to the. To the pervasive marketing, putting, putting them at eye level on shelves where children would see them. and this is all in their documentation. candy cigarettes, flavored cigarettes that they know that the vast majority of adults don’t use. You know, grape flavored and cherry flavored tobacco products. They would advertise in teen vogue and all these teen centered locations. All of that came out during this time. And in the master settlement agreement, a big chunk of it was not about the money. It was about what you’re no longer. You’re agreeing, you will no longer do. And one of the big sections was, you can’t do any of the following to advertise, to kids. And all the stuff I named, you know, can’t make this candy stuff. And, that was the first time in law school where I’m like, wow, this was not one or two rogue people. This was an entire industry, lying before Congress under oath, lying, to the public, knowing that they were killing people, but saying, I don’t give a damn. I’m making my money, and that’s my job. And that’s, You knew it. You knew it was academically. You sort of knew it was possible. And that the way that we build our capitalist, society and put all this power into the hands of these corporations enabled this. But to actually get in and as a law student, read all of these memos and dig into all the evidence was really left an impression on me. I think it really did, change my worldview to be a little more skeptical of any claims by anybody in authority, especially corporations.

>> Speaker C: And you’re probably getting a sense now, in order to be a critical thinker, you have to have critical information.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Correct? Correct. You have to demand it at least, right. You have to be, you have to say, when somebody gives you a proposition, some claim, hey, these cigarettes are not dangerous. These cigarettes are healthy. it’s not enough to just take their word on it. You have to demand that critical information. Where’s the science? Where’s the consensus of monk scientists? I don’t want to just see the doctor from the 1960s, commercials that say, hey, it’s great for your t zone. And all of these, they had doctors. They have commercials that were like, nine out of ten doctors recommend camel cigarettes, right? It’s crazy how much they, as you said, you can pay money to get people to, change opinions. And, that was the industry is, they knew m much like religion, they knew if we don’t get people addicted young, they will never start smoking when they’re adults. So we are going to market to these kids. And I saw a big parallel between that and religion. If you are not indoctrinated when you are young, when your brain is still developing up through 25, you probably won’t be religious later on. It’s not 100%, but they know. The religions know there’s a big, big drop off. And if you go look at it.

>> Speaker B: Is this when you saw that parallel, or did the religion part come in later?

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Religion came later, much later. I can’t say much later, but the analysis at that level, didn’t come until much later. At this point, I was having conversations with friends and family all the time about atheism and things like that, because I had, during this time, also been doing a lot of reading regarding religion. Because growing up outside of religion, for the most part, leaves you in a state of thinking, wow, I see a lot of adults. This is when I’m younger, a lot of adults all believe this stuff. That seems to me, like, kind of weird. Like, this is magic, really, is what they’re talking about. So there must be some sort of information in the Bible or some other dead sea scrolls that I keep hearing about, or tablets or whatever I’m hearing about. There must be some information that they all have access to that I don’t, that has, presented sufficient evidence to convince them that this is all real. And so at some point during this process, I decide, okay, I’m digging into this, and I start reading the Bible. I start reading books about the evidence, and I start finding that there’s no there there. It really is as simple as I had understood it to be, which is a, book says a thing and people believe it. Even though on the scale, on the spectrum of evidence that we have of confidence, it’s really, really low quality evidence.

>> Speaker C: You know, plus, it’s even more believable when it’s 2500 years old.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Right. It’s 2500 years old. It’s, you know, one of the things I like to say is I could not introduce the Bible in court as evidence to support the claims that it makes. That’s how bad the evidence is. You have no chain of custody. We don’t know who wrote the gospels. They’re anonymously written. They were written at least 40 years after Jesus died. the.

>> Speaker B: I think Jay Warner Wallace would disagree with you.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: There are occasions, but this seems to be the vast, consensus amongst not only, sort of neutral or atheistic, religious scholars, but christian scholars. I mean, you open up any study Bible, it says, okay, go to Matthew. Who wrote Matthew? We don’t know. The church tradition says Matthew wrote it, but we don’t know. And it was written 40 years after Jesus died. So you go to each one, and the teaching bibles will say that you go to seminary school. That’s what they’re going to. They’re going to teach you. So that was shocking to me. That’s what started my angry atheist phase, so to speak. everybody sort of goes through an angry atheist phase. Usually it’s because you feel like you were tricked, like you were coming out of a religion, even a high demand religion. Even a low demand religion.

>> Speaker C: But you never paid tithing.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: I never paid tithing. Why were you mad? I didn’t have to say no to social opportunities because I had to go to mass, on a Wednesday or something like that. I didn’t have any of that, but I was seeing again, so I grew up. I’m a teen in the eighties. What happened in the eighties, from a religious standpoint, is the Reagan brings about the satanic, panic and all of that sort of stuff.

>> Speaker C: Bible belt issues.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: All of those things are coming about where we start seeing the GOP strategy to say, hey, there’s this untapped resource of, conservative christians in the country. If we can get them angry, they will vote for us instead of voting for liberal causes like their bible teaches them to do, like we can. We can change the love thy neighbor message into hate. Those that, are against God message, which is what Reagan started. And we get in my own life, I’m told, by the media that playing dungeons and dragons is evil and demonic. Like, that’s. That’s the eighties for me. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

>> Speaker B: Or Power Rangers, you know, makes kids be violent and fight.

>> Speaker C: What’s the kid thing? The kid, squeezy. No, I mean, you know those, the blobs that jump around the green grass area.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Oh, I don’t know.

>> Speaker C: You know what I mean? Maven.

>> Speaker B: No, this is a new one, sort.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Of fever dream you’re having.

>> Speaker C: No, like the teletubbies.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Oh, yes. Teletubbies were pro gay. And, Harry Potter is evil. I mean, it’s continued, but this is, this is where it started. So that’s how I grew up. And so there was a little bit of that, but that sort of satanic panic, you can’t play dungeons and dragons type of thing. That got me. The thing was, one of the things that sort of got me curious, like, well, there must be information that people have that I don’t have access to. And then when I actually dug in and spent the time to dig into the information to read the Bible cover, to cover, to read the debates, to listen to the debates, you realize there’s nothing there. There’s nothing special that should convince people to be as positive, as convinced, as sure of these claims as they are. I can understand people appreciating the message of the character of Jesus. Right. That the words that he said that at the time that he said it were very interesting and inspiring. That’s great. But to give people this confidence to say, I think that we should hang gay people until they’re dead is shocking. And when you realize there’s nothing else other than a book says a thing and it’s an old book, an anonymous book, all of those sorts of things, as far as the gospels goes, at least. and it doesn’t even that. Yeah, yeah, it made me furious, quite frankly. and that’s, that’s a tie in, I think, at the same time as I’m doing the administrative, law, the, the smoking and all of that, and sort of coming into this, this mindset, of how to analyze information from both sides as an attorney, that’s, that’s the moment where I’m like, okay, now I’m really pissed off. And my family will attest you don’t.

>> Speaker B: Necessarily come from, like, a religious background or have been personally to be upset to see what it’s doing to people. And, I mean, that’s how I am with reproductive rights. I’ve. I’ve never needed an abortion. I’ve never been pregnant. At this point, I will not ever be. and so, yeah, and even when, you know, the accusation that it’s just, you know, women just want to have casual sex, I identify as asexual. And so even, you know, I’m nearing 40. I can’t wait till I’m m 40. I will be like, a legitimate 40 year old virgin. And so it’s just like, look, I’m not even interested in just wanton, casual, promiscuous sex. You know, it’s, it, this, it’s way more than that. This is very important. And this is hurting and killing women and children and, you know, for you, for the satanic panic. I mean, it is, it’s kind of wild to me that this is still going on. that I get accused of being, like, literally being an agent of Satan just for caring about reproductive rights. But even as a kid, when I was more religious, I remember really judging my dad for his music taste. He’s, you know, Gen X. He had, he had AC DC. He had, he had, you know, he had a lot of. He’s like, in album form, so you get, you know, and kiss, especially, like, that looked super demonic. And so I really, I honestly judged my dad for that feeling. Like he’s really kind of getting borderline here with this really, you know, satanic, awful, you know, heavy rock metal stuff. Like, it’s kind of. He’s kind of. I felt like he was pushing boundaries and into legitimately dangerous territory because Satan was real to me. The devil was real, his influence and, and evilness. So even. Yeah, I mean, and I was born in the eighties, so this would have been in the nineties for me to be old enough to judge my dad for his music interests. But, yeah, it’s just kind of ironic how that works out.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: And I’m curious where, do you think that those sensations, came from? Like, the concept of it sounds to me, and forgive me, like my interviewing science is taking over, but it sounds to me like you’re both worried for your father. you, you may care for your father at that point, and I’m assuming, you know, you could tell me, but you are also judging your father’s decisions. what do you think influenced you to make those judgments?

>> Speaker B: Oh, definitely the messaging that I was getting currently as a teen, it wasn’t so much strongly like, these things are satanic. But the. We had a pamphlet. It’s called for the strength of the youth. And it had all kinds of guidelines for. Guidelines for dress and grooming and hanging out with the opposite sex. And media. Yeah. And media was a section in there. And it just. It would never say, like, heavy metal is bad or whatever, but it would say it in a way that if you were really scrupulous, which I was, you could take that to just the nth degree.

>> Speaker C: Like, you need to listen to uplifting, music.

>> Speaker B: Listen to music that’s uplifting and, you know, that won’t drive the spirit away. So, you know, and, you know, in my mind, if people have, you know, demonic makeup and they’re screaming into the mic and, you know, they have the guitars and the really heavy, drums, all of that, that just. That didn’t seem very spiritual. And that’s not spiritual for Mormons, too, because, like, some churches may have rock bands, that. That is not a thing and has never been a thing with Mormonism. It’s always been like hymns.

>> Speaker C: And although I would have been in.

>> Speaker B: 1830, that would have been how I interpreted. Yeah, uplifting would. Looks like that. And definitely not like Ac DC.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: And you see this, you see this messaging in many. I don’t. I’m going to use the word cult, but I don’t mean it in the sense that mormonism is necessarily a culture.

>> Speaker B: I’ll say it for you, okay?

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: So at a minimum, we can say high demand religion. you may have heard of the bite model for discerning cultism. behavior, information, thought and emotion. You know, that emotional part is very typical. And even just high demand religions that aren’t necessarily a full on cult is you need to control your emotions. And this is the classic happy M Mormon family experience that I saw with my friends is they are always happy, they always present a unified front. They always are smiling, they are never down, they are never negative. and being told that as a teenager who is going through, literally, I just took my family to see inside out two in the theaters this morning. This is the first day with no school. And we celebrated by going, seeing the premiere of this movie. And it’s all about teenagers learning how to control emotions. And I’m sure as a. As Mormon teams are going through it, they’re being told, control your emotions. Don’t listen to music that would make you down or sad or, or have negative thoughts. It sounds like they’re trying to do a bit of that emotional control at a fairly young age for you.

>> Speaker C: There’s even a primary song. Primary is, you know, the three year olds to twelve year olds. It’s called, if by chance you meet a frown and then you’re supposed to turn it upside down into a smile. So we would hold just like to turn it off.

>> Speaker B: Yeah. And that’s the same like with the dating. You know, our interactions with the opposite sex was also like never to do anything that would like ignite feelings for, you know, and which it was luck, you know, so. Yeah, so that could also. So that’s. I think we’re not as bad as some where it’s like first kiss was across the altar. But there have been Mormons like that. Actually. The current, prophet’s wife, Wendy, she wrote a book, a children’s book called the not even once Club. And that’s, it’s about kissing, it’s about saving the kisses. So I guess maybe I shouldn’t say that we’re all that much better because that is out there and almost.

>> Speaker C: And ah, her book is almost like, you can’t be saved from your sin. Right? Isn’t that part of it?

>> Speaker B: I’m sure it’s terrible.

>> Speaker C: That’s part of what, RFM said about it is like, not even once means like you, you lose. Soon as you make one sin, you’re going to hell. Yeah, right.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Remember?

>> Speaker C: But all these things, all these things contribute to non critical thinking. And it’s. And that’s where your, show comes in. You’re trying to help people think critically. And what was your first, episode about?

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: so, yeah, fast forward to my first episode. So I practice FDA regulatory law for many years. I, find that practicing law is not actually what I’m interested in as much as teaching and teaching law. So I actually, I get a call from my friends, hey, we need help at this company that, that works in the patent industry. So we can do a little bit of law work, you can do a little bit of software work. It’s a nice blend. I go work for that. And that was fairly, you know, that’s what I’ve been doing since then. And then I developed the podcast. And my very first episode, on my podcast was called Common Ground. And, the idea behind the podcast is, I always start off by saying, I am an attorney, I am an atheist, and I am alarmed, and I’m alarmed by the rise of christian nationalism in the United States. But more importantly, I’m alarmed by the massive amount of misinformation that is powering that rise. And then I talk about fighting back against misinformation. And part of that is being a critical thinker. The thing that really inspired me to get going with the podcast was the January 6 insurrection stories, that I read. When I read into the causes for, people supporting maga, I found a bunch of very interesting information. But the most convincing as a political scientist was, what’s his name? Hold on 1 second, let me. Where do I have my. The book here? Yeah, 1 second. So there’s a book, Michael Tesler, Obama’s race. It’s another double entendre. It’s about his skin color and about his run for the presidency. He’s done a lot of work, on this question of what is behind the MAGA crowd, what’s the motivation between this christian nationalism movement and the what I found, I think this was the Chris Hayes podcast. He came on and talked about this data. So after every election, or during each election, there are exit polls and all sorts of polling done. And ever since the Nixon administration, there’s been a question that’s been asked of voters that it was, hey, which party, Democrat or Republican, is supports, African Americans more. Supports african american interests more. Prior to Obama, low educated voters, that is, people without a college degree, overwhelmingly said the GOP was the party of African Americans. On that, Africa. If that question, if you can, if you can believe that, right?

>> Speaker B: Wow.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: So then the Obama election happens, and that question shifts. It was like 80% of low educated voters would say, I should say low educated white voters. 80% believe GOP Obama gets elected. And you see two things happen. One, that question does a double, reverses itself. 80% of low educated white voters now say the democratic party is the party that is best supports the interests of, black Americans. And two, you see a massive, exodus from the democratic party of low educated white voters who go and register a, Republican. That alone right there, speaks volumes to me because this is in the, keep in mind when pre, pre his run, Trump was, saying, he was the original birtherism guy. You know, I’m sending my people to Hawaii now to find this, find out about this, birth certificate. And they’re finding a lot of very cool stuff. Trump starts his campaign coming down an escalator and talks about what those dirty Mexicans, coming across the border are, rapists and drug dealers. He attacks, judges of mexican, descent. It’s all about race. and the GOP co ops, the magm, the tea party, starts right after the Obama election, enabled by Fox news, the people who regularly disseminate, misinformation and, the tea party combines this race, this scapegoat of racism, which is really what a lot of the studies say is it’s the classic scapegoat. It’s like, things are not going well for me. I’m going to blame the other. And then the GOP comes in and says, okay, we’re all christian, we’re all racist, so to speak. I don’t want to say that that’s wrong. What I do want to say is I’m not saying that all Republicans are Nazis, but I’m saying all Nazis are Republicans. Right? So, so we’ve got this big voting bloc, and that leads to trump getting elected. And then when he loses, the misinformation machine is in full swing, the social media is in full swing, and that’s a whole other discussion. but this data that we have leads to the conclusion that January 6 was a religious race riot. I’m, not racist in the sense that, that’s the driving factor. But it really is what got that movement going. And it is the scapegoat that the GOP and white evangelicals have been using as to why they feel like they’re losing power. I think that’s what’s really going on here is white evangelicals are losing power in the country. They realize this. And the story they’ve been fed by Tucker CArlSon on, FOX News is the white replacement theory. I mean, they’re hearing this at all levels at the Stormfront nazi websites or at, on Fox News, they were hearing white replacement. The Democrats are bringing dark skinned people into this country to take it away from you. That’s why when you look at the polls as religious belief is decreasing in this country, and that culminated in January 6. And that when I looked at all this and read these books and, and looked at the numbers, I’m like, okay, I can’t, I can’t sit by anymore. I’m frustrated. My friends and family are getting sick of me spouting off at the dinner table all the time about this stuff. I need to create some information to try to push back. So that’s, that’s how I came up with the podcast in the first episode, which was common ground. And common ground I say, I’m not even going to talk about religion at all. I’m not going to talk about political, parties at all. All I’m going to do is, is to talk about the McDonald’s hot coffee case. You may remember that that was the case back in the, late eighties, early nineties, 92 and 94, where the media came on the air and said a woman was driving around with a cup of hot McDonald’s coffee between her legs. She spilled it, sued McDonald’s, and won $3 million. And that’s what you heard from Katie Couric. That’s what you heard from everybody. Seinfeld had a whole episode where, Kramer spills coffee and goes to see his Johnny Cochran, you know, lookalike lawyer, and they decide to sue. The entire country, heard about this. And that was not by mistake. It was, it was a coordinated effort by people to bring this information out because the information is, this is the classic thing that you see. People will tell you something that is true, and then they will leave out all of the other information, and that’s how they can morally justify it to themselves, I think.

>> Speaker C: Sounds like a Mormon missionaries pitch, really? new members.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Yeah. I mean, leave a lot out. Yeah, leave, leave a lot out. So the information they left out about this case is she wasn’t the driver. She wasn’t driving. The car wasn’t moving. It was parked in the McDonald’s parking lot. They had gotten the coffee, and, like good, safe drivers, her, I think it was her nephew pulled over to add the cream or whatever. She did spill the coffee. So, yes, woman with coffee in car spills it on herself. But then what they didn’t tell you is she got third degree burns over seven, eight, 9% of her body. She spent eight days in the, in the burn unit emergency ward getting multiple skin graft surgeries. She, had, was, in the hospital for weeks. She took many weeks to recover when her daughter had to take off work to care for her because she couldn’t move while she was growing her skin back. She had two years of medical bills, treatments that she would have to go through. She was permanently disfigured. And then the next thing, product that you’re supposed to drink that McDonald’s is saying, here, put this, take this drive through. Take this and drive on. So again, what they said is true. Woman in car spills coffee, sues and wins $3 million. The part about the lawsuit that they left out is she didn’t sue initially, despite what I just told you. She wrote a letter, a, very naive letter to McDonald’s saying, hey, this happened. I think there’s a problem with that coffee pot in this restaurant. Could you please pay me for the money that my insurance won’t cover? She didn’t ask for pain and suffering. She didn’t hire a lawyer. She herself, with her family, wrote a letter because it was in today’s money, about $32,000 that she was out. And I don’t know about you, but I can’t take a $32,000 hit and just keep on going. So she writes to McDonald’s, could you please help? McDonald’s basically tells her, f you. They say, we’ll give you $800, not $32,800. So that’s when they decide, okay, we can’t do that. We can’t. We can’t absorb this cost. That’s when they hire a lawyer. So McDonald’s walks themselves into court many times, and the lawyer discovers what the. This lawyer discovers. McDonald’s has been doing this for a decade. They’ve been burning people all over the country. This is pre Internet. Keep in mind, for people who may not know this, this is pre Internet. And, they’ve been covering it up by paying people 400, $800 here or there, and nobody finds out about it because there is no subreddit on I got burned at McDonald’s. There is no Facebook group for McDonald’s survivors. There’s no way to share information. He discovers this. The jury, you know, eventually it makes multiple settlement offers, goes to mediation, where the mediator, who mediators are sort of pseudo judges, you go to them before you go to court. If you want to try to find avoid a trial, they go to a mediator. The mediator says, I think that the fair thing. And mediators, keep in mind, try to split the baby. They always try to come in in the middle. They never will say, stella is her name. Stella was totally right. So they come in and say, I think McDonald’s should pay you $160,000. Like, that’s the middle, right? McDonald’s says no. McDonald’s walks themselves into court. The jury hears all of this, and they decide to award her not only her damages, but punitive damages, because they find it’s gross negligence. If you can find that, it’s willful disregard, knowing disregard for people’s safety, you can punish them. Normally at civil trials, you don’t punish. You just try to make somebody whole here. They punished her. And, to punish her, they awarded her two days of coffee sales for McDonald’s.

>> Speaker C: Wow.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: I thought was.

>> Speaker B: I remembered. Yeah, there was something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: And, that was, many millions of dollars. Yeah. It’s a bullet point. Like I say in the show, it’s a bullet point. A quarterly report for McDonald’s. M. It’s just operating a cost for them, and it’s $3 million worth of like that. And, the judge, reduces it and says, hey, we have a limit to, punitive damages. The jury doesn’t know this when they’re deliberating, but you can only award three times the amount of actual damages. So he dropped to that total way down to 600 and something thousand for punitive. But you never hear that. All you hear from the media and from especially, republican, operatives is woman spills coffee in a car, sues and wins $3 million. All of which was true. And they leave out everything else. And then for the second half of my episode, I basically go through, hey, here’s what was actually going on. And we have recordings, we have memos, we have all sorts of stuff showing that it was not by accident that they were doing this. And it was a concerted effort, starting with the Reagan, Ronald Reagan, at enacting what’s called tort reform, which is a, code for, we don’t want citizens to be able to recover their damages in court. We want frivolous lawsuits. We want to call this a frivolous lawsuit. And, that was the marketing. I play recordings of an organization called ATRA, American Tort Reform association. Their goal, it. Who formed Atra, it’s going back to, to tobacco, Philip Morris, and all of those companies and chemical companies and, Ob gyn organizations who have a lot of malpractice. All of these big companies create this organization called ATtRA, which is what’s called an astroturf organization. And for people not familiar with that, Astroturf is the fake graphs that you use on sports.

>> Speaker C: Evergreen.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Right? So it’s, it created sub organizations that looked like grassroots organizations, people for court reform, citizens united against frivolous lawsuits and all of that stuff.

>> Speaker B: But they were so good. I hate how good they are at that. And I just, I think about everything today, even supplements. Like, there are some supplements that I need my doctor, recommended recently, and I just asked, well, I said, I want, can you give me a recommendation? Because there’s so many out there, and I’m, I’m already learning how. I already know a little bit about the fight for regulation, you know, or I fight against regulating supplements. and that some supplements, when tested, don’t even have the ingredient that they’re being sold for. And not just that. Some do, but not in the amounts that you think you’re getting or with arsenic involved, you know, just all kinds of things. Or. I remember when I think Michelle Obama ran a campaign there, was trying to get more healthy meals into, Yeah, into schools, and then that whole, that became the nanny state, you know? And then, but then I feel like it was the same people that switched when they were like, well, now pizza accounts as a health food because it’s got tomato sauce, and it’s like, why.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Do you think that happens? Reagan arguing, is a vegetable.

>> Speaker B: Yeah, it’s just my favorite vegetable. the ability, I think, to get masses of people to vote against their own interest is really disheartening sometimes.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Yeah. And that’s the theme of the episode we go on to show Reagan. We have audio of Reagan giving a speech where he’s doing the same thing. He tells a story, he leaves out vital information, and he’s speaking to Attra as the president of the United States, misleading millions of Americans into voting for tort reform. they try it at the federal level, and Bill Clinton vetoes it. It passes, but tort reform fails at the federal level. And that’s a really good example. I think my best example of, like, hey, it matters. People, people will sit here and say, well, I’m disenfranchised. I don’t care if Biden wins or Trump wins. And my counter to that is Bill Clinton vetoed tort reform. Right. Tort reform is so, that your access to the judicial system is so important that there is, it’s in the constitution that you. That trial by jury is a right. And no fact in the Constitution, no fact determined by a jury, can be otherwise undermined. I forget the exact phrases. Or found to be false by any other process. So you can’t have a jury say, what are facts that find? The jury find, you were speeding, the light was red. you did slip and fall, the company was negligent, you were damaged. $640,000. Like, these are all facts that juries find. The constitution says Congress or the state legislature can’t come along and pass a law that says, in this case, we create a law that says the, light was green, or that you were going 52 miles an hour or whatever. That’s. They protected your right to the, to the jury box because why? Well, corporations and powerful interests can capture legislatures. It’s called lobbying. It’s called official unofficial bribery. they get their man in office and they own Congress. They can capture the executive right. They look at Trump, he’ll do whatever the religious right wants or whatever companies want. they can even capture judges where judges either need to get nominated by the president. So they get their president in to nominate their judges, or if they’re elected, they can donate to their campaigns, but they can’t get inside the jury box, because if they do try to wine and dine the jury, they go to prison, and they don’t like that. And so tort reform was the way to say, we don’t want to control 95% of the governance in this country. We want to take away that ability that is guaranteed in the constitution to protect the citizens against a government trying to change the facts. So we want to get inside the jury box and say, you can’t, you can’t find that somebody was damaged $3 million. You can only find that they were damaged 100,000. And I’m so sorry. We live in a country without national health care, which is, by the way, Stella Liebeck’s case would not have even happened if we had national health care. All she wanted was covered for damages. So it’s all one big picture of, we want the money, and we don’t want you to be able to fight back against us. And if we create an unsafe working condition where you lose your leg and you need $5 million of therapy and, and durable medical equipment and all these things for the rest of your life. Sorry, you voted for tort reform. You get $200,000. Go pound sand. That’s the message of the first episode. And the point of it is to say, hey, I’m an atheist, you may be religious, I’m liberal, you may be conservative. I’m male, you may be female, I’m white, you may be black, whatever. Can we all agree? I mean, I lay out the facts. It’s hard to dispute that this is what’s going on. We have documentaries and documentaries about this. We have professors who have been writing about this case for decades now as the single best example of corporations lying to Americans to get them to vote against their self interest. So, getting back to the Clinton thing, Clinton, vetoed it, saved the country. Now, there are states, there’s 30 something states that adopted tort reform, and there’s, I talk about a case of somebody in one of those states. Their Ob Gyn was negligent. They had twins. One of their twins was, was brain damaged. As a result, they needed something like $5 million, and, they got practically nothing because their own state had enacted tort reform. So, don’t sit on the couch. Don’t think that there’s no difference between two candidates, because one candidate will do things like, at least veto tort reform when the when the corporate interests try to prevent you from being made whole at court.

>> Speaker C: And one thing I say to, believers will say, I’ll say, so if you believe in a creator, the creator helped make your brain. You would honor the creator even more if you used it.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Yeah. It’s the most complicated object in the solar system, is what scientists will say. You’ve got, you know, 10 billion neurons, each neurons connected to 10,000 other neurons. It’s the most complicated thing out there. So, from a religious standpoint, this is where I was in my middle years, when I was sort of grappling with, do I want to call myself an atheist? I would say all the time was, if there is a God, he made me this way. He chose. He at least chose a few, if theoretically there was a God that knows what’s going to happen. He knew that when he chose this universe, like, he could have chosen any universe, any future, any timeline, so to speak, he chose this one in which I would have a brain that is doing this to cause me to become convinced that, there’s not enough evidence for a God. So, at a minimum, I would say, I used my brain that God gave me to determine that I’m not justified in believing that there’s a God yet. he’s a trickster. He could be. He could be. Or maybe there’s just not enough evidence, or maybe he doesn’t exist. Who knows?

>> Speaker B: But, maybe he’s the malevolent guy.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: It could be, yeah. what if Satan wrote the Bible? Right? I know religious people don’t like hearing that, but the fact that you don’t even like hearing that and won’t even engage in the hypothetical question should tell you something about what your brain is doing to you when you’re asked that question.

>> Speaker C: That’s right. Well, thanks, Graham, for coming on our show. I, have an idea for you. Instead of just a double entendre, you could be a triple entente, and you could be really, really mad. You could be the cross.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Cross. Exactly.

>> Speaker C: So think of that.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: You know you 100%. And to your point, one other. One other note real quickly. You had mentioned supplements and the battle over ingredients and stuff. My backgrounds in FDA regulatory law for season two. My intro was also called common ground two, and it was a three part, three episode arc, about homeopathy, the history of the FDA, and again, misinformation, going out there and tricking people into doing things against their self interest.

>> Speaker C: We have some homeopathy fans because they watch, like, 3 seconds of our show, and then they go somewhere else. I don’t understand it.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Yeah, it’s, What I do in that is, I overdose on, homeopathic painkillers. I take 240 painkilling, pills on airplanes. And then I go to the, poison control center website, and you can put it into test mode so they don’t think it’s real. Case, it asks you only two relevant questions. How old are you? And what’s your gender? And then they. And what ingredient did you take? There’s some side things like, was this an attempt to self harm? Was this. Were you prescribed this? But as soon as you tell them, I took this, not how much, just, I took this. I’m a male, and I’m 54 years old. It says, okay, you have nothing to worry about. There’s a whole page. You can see it on my episode. And at the bottom, this is the telling part. Why didn’t we ask you how much you weigh and how many pills you took? They never asked me that. Which is what you need to know. If you know anything about medicine or drugs, you need to know those two things to know what. Like, everything’s toxic in the right amounts, right? So they have a paragraph. This is, why didn’t we ask you? And they say, well, these substances are known as minimally toxic. basically the paragraph just says, no matter how much you take of this, there will be no, no, no effect whatsoever, so don’t even worry about it. And then the last sentence is basically, literally, says, we are very careful. So it’s this coded language to say, you just. I don’t care how many homeopathic pain relief pills you just took, they’re just sugar. And so that should tell people things. So those.

>> Speaker C: Didn’t you feel better for having all that sugar?

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: I felt ill. You can see it on camera. I, like, I literally have. I don’t know if I still have it around here, but I took, like, a bowl full of this and just sort of ate it. It’s basically, if you do the math, it’s about one and a half sticks worth of pez is how much sugar I took. And a little, like, 20 minutes in, I’m like, I’m not feeling great. Like, I’m failing. Like. Like. Like sugar, you know, sweet over, like, that Halloween feeling you had as a kid. Have you had a lot of sugar?

>> Speaker C: Every day. I feel that way.

>> Speaker B: Putting your body on the line for the truth. That’s. Yeah, that’s great. And hopefully we can have you. Have you back again, so. But, yeah, thank you.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: I’d love to. I’ve watched a lot of your episodes since you guys reached out to me. Thank you for reaching out to me. you guys have very interesting discussions. I like your focus. We didn’t really talk on the process of creation, but, I love your focus on that. There’s not a lot of people talking about that as well. So love, to come back and.

>> Speaker C: Chat as, oh, yeah, there is one last thing, because we have another hour. No, I’m just kidding. But maybe m for like three or four minutes, you could talk about the process of getting on John Delin’s show.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: It’s very simple. I emailed John and he said, sure. and then we, he was basically, he was very generous. I’m summer, I’m trying to keep this short, but basically I emailed him. I said, here’s my focus. Here’s what I’d like to talk to you about. Would you be interested? And he probably, of course, checked out my channel and all of that stuff and eventually said, yes. We, then I tend to do sort of the lawyer thing, and I write up a massive outline of all the information. My understanding of your background, here’s my understanding of your history, here’s all the questions I’m thinking about answering. And I emailed that to him. And I think he probably was like, he’s so busy. I didn’t realize at the time how busy he was. I think he was probably like, yeah, whatever, let’s do the interview. And so, he was, as you’ve seen on Mormon Stories podcast, he’s got two three hour episodes. And he was very generous and gave me a lot of time and was, a sheer joy to work with. He obviously is one of those people I enjoy talking to. Anybody who is an expert in their field, I don’t care if it has to do with hydro static engineering or religion or what. If they’re an expert and they’re passionate about it, I want to talk to them personally, not from necessarily my show. But when you talk to those people, they can just go on, you know, and you ask them about anything and just hearing how they think about things and hearing their story. And that’s what I got from him is I could, I could jump in and sort of comment and then ask him how he felt, but mostly I could just say, what are your thoughts on this? Or, and then what happened? The classic, you know, cross examining question. When you have got somebody on the stand or direct question, you can say and then what happened? And he’ll just continue his story. And he was really, really good storyteller. So I m think he’s had a.

>> Speaker B: Lot of years of practice, especially of summing, summing up complex Mormon topics very, very well, which is, which is something that I think is underrated. And people don’t understand how difficult that can be. And I know for me, especially newly deconstructing, if someone, even now, if someone gets me on the topic of mormonism, like, I can just go and go and go. and so many topics are related, so John’s really good at keeping it.

>> Speaker C: Maven and I are quick learners, and we’ll probably be better than John Delin by September, I’m pretty sure.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Yeah, his 20 plus years is really just need a pill and swallow it.

>> Speaker B: Anyone can do that.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: And the way I found him was, I think it was nuance ho’s, eve episode, which is her most popular video. I mistakenly had remembered it being John Delin, but he was on it. that was the most compelling thing I’d ever seen as far as it goes to religious belief. And that’s, I think what’s so interesting to non Mormons or never Mormons, about the current happenings in the mormon church is the mormon church is sort of a laboratory experiment, because it happened so recently that we have documentation and we have witnesses and we have stories. And, you can dig into it as a researcher and say, oh, wow, look at these records and look at these stories, and you can see it happening. Now you can go and talk to people who still believe that Joseph Smith had golden plates and had a divine, interaction, all that sort of stuff. But I saw that video, I started watching more, I found his channel, watched more of that, and then I bought, this book, you know, roughly. And then I bought the more official version. And then finally I found, Alyssa Grenfell and bought her book. And it really sent me down a. A rabbit hole of I. And I. Johnna asked me this, on the, on this, on the interview is like, or observes this, that, hey, there’s a lot of non Mormons that are interested in this moment where Mormonism is having to deal with information, escaping out into the wild, what’s so fascinating about it? And it’s like, it’s, as somebody who’s never believed this stuff, I can talk to people who are going through this process. And the episode with Eve is the only time I’ve seen it happen in real time where people are being presented with information that contradicts or calls into question their core beliefs by people that they trust on camera over 3 hours. And, my heart went out to her like everybody else. I’m a cheerleader for her and people like her, and it’s just fascinating to see because it humanizes everybody. As somebody who’s never been a real believer, it’s easy to slip into the assumption that these people are slower than you or gullible or whatever, but no, indoctrination is an extremely strong force, and it applies not only in this religious realm, but also in the realm of politics, which is what I try to push back again, is trying to understand people who are trying to make this an actual christian nation and trying to fight against them.

>> Speaker C: That’s right. I don’t think can suspend reality for their guy.

>> Speaker C: Would you call that special pleading?

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Special pleading, yep.

>> Speaker C: Right. Your honor, all this evidence would convict anybody else, but my guy is innocent with all this evidence.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Yeah. After Hunter Biden’s conviction, the conspiracy theory went into double down mode and said, oh, well, the only reason hiding Hunter Biden’s on trial and being convicted is because the evil mastermind, Joe Biden, wanted him to be convicted. To try to show that the DOJ even have. Yes. That you like next level conspiracy theory. And the. So the ability for people to hear that and not call into question the messenger, that’s what fascinates me the most.

>> Speaker B: Fascinates and disturbs, I guess.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Yeah.

>> Speaker C: Did you want to say one more thing, Maven?

>> Speaker B: Oh, yeah. Wait, what?

>> Speaker C: Did you want to say one more thing?

>> Speaker B: Oh, no, I just, I really loved this interview, and I think, I definitely want to check out more of your channel, and I hope a lot of success for you as you cover these topics, because they’re, they’re important, they’re affecting people in major, major ways. So.

>> Speaker C: Yeah, and I’ll say John Delin’s appearance on your show has more than tripled your subscribers. And if we get John on pretty soon, I expect the same results.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Yeah, I owe, a lot to him, to his generosity. My channel, I started as a podcast. You’ll, you’ll see all my, all my shows are audio only. You can find me@thecrossexaminer.net is my website or on YouTube, if you just search for the cross examiner podcast. but I started as a podcast, ever since I was young, my, my family always told me I had a face for radio. So, I started, I started out audio only, and I tend to just do audio only, because that’s to be honest, makes production a lot easier when you’re on camera recording things live and you mess up. I’m sure you’re very familiar. You constantly feel this need to edit, to stop and restart things. You didn’t quite get it right. I wasn’t looking here. I had to look something up in the middle of a sentence. And editing that all out in video is harder to do than in audio. But, I am trying to make more, ah, video episodes, because of my experience with Doctor Delin. I found that, obviously that’s more compelling when people are on camera talking to each other or to you. And he, I went from. All of my subscribers were at the podcast level, not even on YouTube. But YouTube just blew up, for me and relatively blew up for me when that episode dropped. and I didn’t market it at all. That’s not true. I made one post on the, ex Mormon subreddit saying, hey, I’ve got an interview here with John, Dillon, if anybody’s interested. And it’s, you know, 25, 26,000 views. And normally I would get hundreds.

>> Speaker C: Maybe, maybe I marketed a little bit for you. I think I posted on my wall and a couple other places.

>> Speaker B: Superpower.

>> Speaker C: Yeah, that’s what I do.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Yeah.

>> Speaker C: And so. So anyway, thanks, Graham, for coming on our show. Everyone who likes our content, please like and subscribe. And everybody, have a great summer. Bye bye.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: You too. Bye bye. And that wraps up the interview. Thanks so much to ladder daily digest for reaching out and asking me to have a chat with them. I really enjoyed my time talking with them. Please use the link in the description of this video or podcast to visit their channel. And if you enjoy their content, remember to give them a like and a subscribe. Same for mine. By the way, I don’t do any commercials or monetization, so anything that you do for liking, subscribing, putting on reminders will really help my channel reach more people and hopefully give everybody the ammunition they need to push back against all the misinformation that’s traveling around now. One of the things I wanted to talk about before wrapping up this episode is what my plans are for the next few episodes. first we’ve got the story from the Supreme Court where the FDA, the effective ban on the FDA approving the abortion pill has been reversed. So good news for everybody. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg when you dig into this story and the judge who initially held the decision to, to enjoin FDA from approving this drug. I think you’ll, you’ll agree it’s a classic example of christian nationalism sneaking into our courts. So that’s my next episode. After that, I’ve got a ton of current events that we need to talk about. I’ll be pulling those in, probably be doing some rocket dockets and some why we cares. I need to get back to continue my, my, series on faith healing. Right now it’s, just a challenge to get all of this content out. I have a lot I want to talk about, but I’ve still got a full time job, so this is more of a nights and weekend type of thing. So thank you for your patience. If you have any ideas, please email them to me@infoecrossaminer.net. dot. You can also just find me on my website@thecrossexaminer.net. dot. Okay, so that’s what we’ve got planned for now. I’ll just sign off and say see you next time. This has been the cross examiner podcast, the Internet’s courtroom in the case of rationality versus religion. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider subscribing. See you soon.